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THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY 



EDITED BY 

WILL D. HOWE 

PBOF£SSOR OF ENGLISH AT INDIANA UNIVEBS2TV 



ESSAYS BY 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



The Modern Student's Library 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL 

By George Meredith. 
THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS. 

By William Makepeace Thackeray. 
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. 

By Thomas Hardy. 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 
ADAM BEDE. 

By George Eliot. 
ENGLISH POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY. 
THE RING AND THE BOOK. 

By Robert Browning. 
PAST AND PRESENT. 

By Thomas Carlyle. 
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. 

By Jane Austen. 
THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN. 

By Sir Walter Scott. 
THE SCARLET LETTER. 

By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
THE ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVEN- 

SON. 
NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. 
THE ESSAYS OF ADDISON AND STEELE. 
Each small 12mo. 75 cents net. 

Other volumes in preparation. 



THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY 



ESSAYS BY 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
BY 

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS 

LAMP90N PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT YALB 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 



9> 



^^%\^ 



Copyright, 1892, 1895, 1905, 1918, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



JUL 27 I9i8 

©CI.A501306 
A 

.7C 



PREFACE 

The text of the essays in this volume is taken from the 
Thistle Edition of the works of Stevenson, published by 
Charles Scribner's Sons, in New York. Every article is com- 
plete and unabridged; and I have followed, with two ex- 
ceptions, the chronological order of first publication, the 
date being given in each instance. I have attempted to make 
a selection that should illustrate the range of the author's 
thought and style. Thus I have included essays in formal 
literary criticism, essays of personal monologue and gossip, 
and philosophical essays on the greatest themes that can oc- 
cupy the mind of man. 

W. L. P. 

Yalh University, 
Tuesday, 9 April, 1918. 



INTRODUCTION 

Most of the essays in this book were written by an obscure 
man. The reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson dates from 
the year 1886, when he pubhshed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; 
for the remaining eight years of his Hfe his name was known 
wherever the Enghsh language was spoken. But his dehght 
in recognition was shadowed by two things — chronic ill- 
health, and the necessity of living far from the centres of 
civilisation. After he became a famous novelist, he indulged 
freely and full}^ his genius as a teller of tales; comparatively 
few formal essays came from his pen, although this loss is 
partly made up by the remarkable letters that lent enchant- 
ment to his distance. 

Of the twenty-four pieces in this volume, only five were 
printed after 1886; three of these are reminiscent, and two 
are frankly didactic. The remaining nineteen, fruit of earlier 
years, are selected not merely for their display of literary 
excellence, but because thej^ illustrate his intellectual curi- 
osity. Some of them are outdoor papers, impressions re- 
ceived on long, lonely walks; some are essays in literary 
criticism; some are moral reflections on the human comedy, 
thoughts on falling in love, on conversation as a fine art, 
on old age and death; some are meant to stimulate us by 
the defense of a paradox; one belongs to the caninical works 
of literature. All reveal the complex, whimsical, humorous, 
romantic, imaginative, puritanical personality now known 
everywhere by the formula R. L. S. 

Stevenson had a literary as well as a moral conscience. 
During his whole life, he never wrote for publication one 
slipshod page. He always did his best. In the early years 
of obscurity, when he knew that his work would be read by 
only a few, he took as much pains with it as if it had been 
addressed to an audience of a hundred critics; after his repu- 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

tation was so high that anything bearing his name commanded 
commercial value, he never permitted himself to become 
careless or lazy. The article must in every case be worthy 
of the trade-mark. 

Furthermore, he never wrote mechanically. The reason 
why, out of so many aspirants, so few attain unmistakable 
success is because only a few have sufficient energy to last 
day in, day out, year after year. The novelty of any under- 
taking will keep most men and women brisk for a month or 
so; then routine, which has destroyed so many hopeful be- 
ginners, changes vigour into mediocrity, and mediocrity into 
incompetence. The clerk in the book-store gazes at the cus- 
tomer with lacklustre eye, as if he almost resented being 
disturbed by a visitor; the professor gets through the class- 
room hour as though his little body were awearj^ of this great 
world; the clergjinan reads the prayers like Poll Parrot. 
But the deadly dullness of mechanical performances, so char- 
acteristic of the majority of the children of men, changes into 
newness of life with those happy mortals who rise above 
the crowd. The clerk greets the customer eagerly, knowing 
he is to bring together two forces, an author and a reader; 
the professor strives to make each recitation an event in 
the lives of his pupils; the clergyman reads the Scripture 
as though he had just received it from Almighty God, and 
was giving the audience news of transcendent importance. 

From the day when Stevenson took a pen in his hand to 
that December evening in 1894 when he dropped dead amidst 
the ardours of literary composition, the primal energy never 
flagged. His spirit embarked upon every new book as upon 
a glorious adventure — which every book ought to be — and 
his reverent devotion to art never permitted him to let any- 
thing pass which he knew to be second-rate. 

Stevenson made contributions to five distinct branches 
of literature. He wrote novels, poems, essays, plays, letters. 
His plays were not successful; every now and then one of 
them is "revived," but the history of English drama was 
neither enriched nor changed by his efforts. It is a pity, 
however, that he could not have lived to see the stage ver- 
sion of Treasure Island, which, arranged, mounted, and acted 



INTRODUCTION ix 

in an admirable manner, proved to be one of the most ap- 
pealing dramatic performances in the twentieth century- 
American theatre. Billy Bones, Silver, Pew and the others 
enchanted thousands of people; and on the boards, as in 
the printed romance, the earlier scenes were the most im- 
pressive. While it is true that he could not write an original 
play, we ought to remember that two of the most interest- 
ing dramas of recent times came out of his mind — Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island. Perhaps more will fol- 
low. 

Stevenson can hardly be classed among the English poets, 
although he wrote much verse. Some of the child poems 
seem to be permanent; they are known, recited, and sung 
everywhere; two or three of them have become a part of 
the English language; but his genius does not shine most 
brightlj^ in rime and rhythm, for he was essentially a prosa- 
teiir. 

In the long list of English letter-writers, he has an un- 
assailable position. His epistles are not only invaluable 
to the historian of modern English literature — sparkling 
with significant comment on contemporary books and au- 
thors — they are beautiful specimens of the obsolescent art 
of correspondence. They have an extraordinary charm which 
time and change cannot take away. Furthermore, they 
reveal a character so full of courage and charity, that, taking 
all the letters together, we have one of the great moral books 
of the nineteenth century. No one can read them without 
being stimulated. 

As a novelist, Stevenson is a classic. He is in the front 
row. He belongs with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Scott, 
Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith 
and Hardy. One can scarcely imagine any future period of 
time when Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, Kid- 
napped and The Ebb Tide will not be read with zest. His 
art "greatened and deepened and lengthened" with increas- 
ing years and experience; had he lived to complete Weir of 
Hermiston, the world would have possessed not only one 
more thrilling story, but a new and profound study of human 
character. 



X INTRODUCTION 

I am quite aware that there has been during the last few 
years what is known as a ''reaction" against Stevenson. 
There are critics who would now persuade us that after all 
he was not a great writer or a great artist. These attempts 
at depreciation need trouble no lover of the essays and novels. 
We know whom we have believed. Since 1894 the youth of 
America have been brought up on Stevenson; they are never 
going to forget the debt. But besides being an almost ideal 
writer for boys, he remains our refuge and delight through 
all the voyage of life. The more we grow, the less possible 
it is to outgrow Stevenson. There are "reactions" against 
Tennyson, against Dickens, against Stevenson — mere fluc- 
tuations in the literary stock market. Furthermore it is 
easier to attract attention by attacking a classic writer than 
by defending him. 

As an essayist, Stevenson is again in the first class; no 
one would have the temerity to make a collection of represen- 
tative British essays and omit his work. His absence would 
be conspicuous. 

We may conveniently if not strictly divide essays into 
three classes — essays in literary criticism, an art brought to 
its highest perfection by Sainte-Beuve; philosophical and 
reflective essays, demanding a union of thought and style, 
where no one has surpassed Francis Bacon; and the per- 
sonal essay, a field in which the supreme master is Mon- 
taigne. It is by no accident that two out of the three leaders 
are men of France. French literature has a longer list of 
great prose writers than any other, the French language is 
peculiarly adapted to the form of WTitten prose, and the 
French intellect is almost instinctively critical. 

Before he was thirty years old, Stevenson had tried his 
hand at all three varieties of the essay; and in two of them 
he has won what looks like permanent fame. His purely lit- 
erary criticism is the least important part of his work; and 
yet it is by no means without distinction. His courageous 
defense of romance as opposed to realism is adequately rep- 
resented in this volume by three essays, published in 1882, 
1883, and 1884. The dates are significant, for at that time 
Realism was enthroned, with scarcely a sign of revolt. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

Stevenson not only led a revolt, he started a revolution; 
and although he had only a few years to live, he lived long 
enough to see the tyrant cast out, and the new order estab- 
lished. He could not have accomplished this, had he not 
been able by sheer creative genius to illustrate his precepts 
by splendid examples of original romance. The Romantic 
Revival of 1884-1904 owed more to Stevenson than to any 
other man, and if that had been his only achievement, it 
would have earned him a place in the history of English 
literature. 

In addition to these polemical writings, the reader will 
find three formal essays in literary criticism — Walt Whitman, 
Thoreau, and Pepys. The first, originally called The Gospel 
According to Walt Whitman, is still the best criticism of his 
work that I have read; while the other two are full of subtle 
appreciations. Still, we do not go to Stevenson for the ap- 
praisal of books and authors; we can find that elsewhere. 

As a philosopher, Stevenson wrote two masterpieces — 
/Es Triplex and Pulvis et Umbra, of which the former is the 
better. It is indeed the best essay he ever wrote; and anyone 
who thinks it displays cleverness rather than genius should 
du two things. First, he should reread it; second, he should 
remember it was published when the author was only twenty- 
seven years old. Stevenson walked in the valley of the shadow 
of death and feared no evil. Young poets and romancers 
iove to dwell on thoughts of death and the grave, but their 
reflections are usuall}^ largel}'' composed of self-pity; a form 
of indulgence which is dangerously near cowardice. Now 
just as Stevenson's unconquerable optimism was based on 
chronic physical suffering, so his knightly attitude toward 
death was based on the constant proximity of the pale con- 
queror. He lived with death as with a familiar. At every 
meal, on every walk, and in the long watches of the night, 
he was aware of his company; but he showed no fear. The 
reflections on old age and death in ^s Triplex are composed 
of observation and experience; they are sincere. There is 
something in this essay for every man and woman in the 
world; and the solemn grandeur of the theme is harmonised 
ill a prose music full of dignity and beauty. There is a noble 



xii INTRODUCTION 

elevation in the language that is as satisfying to our love of 
art as the core of thought is nourishing to our spirit. Let 
us remember also that as Stevenson was not afraid of denth. 
neither was he afraid of life. 

Stevenson was a great talker, a master of conversation; 
and good talk is one of the highest forms of pleasure known 
to cultivated men and women. Stevenson pondered much 
over this form of art, as he did over other forms; and his 
two essays on Talk and Talkers furnish excellent suggestions 
with concrete human examples. The "personal essay" is 
glorified talk, where subjects that would be trivial with some 
conversationalists, and subjects that would be oppressively 
dull in the mouths of others, are made respectively charming 
and impressive by Stevenson. No one has ever equalled 
Montaigne as a talker from the printed page; it is enough 
to say that anything whatever that interested him is certain 
to interest us, if only he will tell us about it. Other great 
"personal" essayists are Sir TJiomas Browne and Charles 
Lamb, while the ever-living Anatomy of Melancholy is a gi- 
gantic personal essay. Today the personal essay" has in- 
vaded l^e field of poetry, and many of our modern versifiers 
write in the conversational and confidential style. Steven- 
son composed some pieces where he is thinking out loud in 
beautiful prose; the four parts of Virginibits Piierisque, 
Crabbed Age and Youth, and above all, An Apology for Idlers^ 
represent him in his happiest moods. Nothing perhaps is 
more interesting than a paradox brilliantly supported, and 
few things more fruitful to readers who are fit. Thus, An 
Apology for Idlers contains not only flashes of rich humour, 
it has a challenge to all of us who are strenuous and serious; 
which means that every "successful" American ought to 
read this essa5^ For what shall it profit a man, if he shall 
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? 

Stevenson, in his every-day life and conduct, was unselfish : 
that is, he was thinking of the comfort and convenience of 
others rather than of his own security. When he lay sick in 
bed, and an active small boy entered the room, instead of re- 
garding the child as an intolerable nuisance, he was sorry that 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

he himself could not be an acceptable play-mate; he felt sure 
that the boy was bored by the horizontal gentleman who 
wasn't up to anything. And in Stevenson's writings the 
ethical element of unselfishness is ever present; when he 
addresses himself to us, as he does in the personal essays, 
he is not thinking of our own personal gain so much as of 
our capacity to increase the happiness of those with whom 
we live. The aim of An Apology for Idlers is to make men 
and women more interesting, not in what they do, but in 
what the}' are; for he understood quite well that those who 
have an interesting personality are a domestic and com- 
munal blessing. It is not enough to be a successful lawyer 
or merchant; it is perhaps more important to be a successful 
husband or father or friend. 

Strange that a young Scot should have been able to make 
so many new observations on a theme so old as Life. But 
that is always the wonder of genius; one can understand 
how a violinist, born with supple fingers and perfect ears, 
can master the technique of his instrument at an early age; 
but where and how did the youth learn to interpret Beetho- 
ven? 

William Lyon Phelps. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

ORDERED SOUTH (1874) 1 

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES (1874) . 14 

WALKING TOURS (1876) 23 

VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

I (1876) . '^*^^' . . . 33 

II (1881) 46 

III ON FALLING IN LOVE (1877) 56 

IV TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE (1879) 66 

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS (1877) 76 

^^S TRIPLEX (1878) 87 

WALT WHITMAN (1878) 97 

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH (1878) 124 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1880) 138 

SAMUEL PEPYS (1881) * . . . . 168 

TALK AND TALKERS (1882) 195 

A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE (1882) 220 

THE CHARACTER OF DOGS (1883) 235 

A NOTE ON REALISM (1883) . 246 

XV 



xvi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE (1884) 253 

s^^'SneLD MORTALITY (1884) 267 

THE MANSE (1887) 277 

A COLLEGE MAGAZINE (1887) 285 

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME (1887) . 294 "^ 

THE LANTERN BEARERS (1888) 302 

PULVIS ET UMBRA (1888) 316 



ESSAYS BY 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



STEVENSON'S ESSAYS 

ORDERED SOUTH 

(1874) 

By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are 
sent when health deserts us are often singularly beauti- 
ful. Often, too, they are places we have visited in 
former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept 
ever afterward in pious memory; and we please our- 
selves with the fancy that we shall repeat many vivid 
and pleasurable sensations, and take up again the thread 
of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall. We 
shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleas- 
ant excursions, interrupted of yore before our curiosity 
was fully satisfied. It may be that we have kept in 
mind, during all these years, the recollection of some 
valley into which we have j ust looked down for a moment 
before we lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; 
it may be that we have lain awake at night, and agree- 
ably tantalized ourselves with the thought of corners we 
had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: 
we shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete 
all these unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the bar- 
riers that confined our recollections. 

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led 
away when hope and memory are both in one story, that 
I dare say the sici man is not very inconsolable when 
he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to 

1 



2 ORDERED SOUTH 

regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident 
of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir 
and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes 
to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days of 
noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves 
into something of their old quickness and sensibility, 
and so he can enjo}^ the faint autumnal splendor of the 
landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, 
clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the 
first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the 
fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy 
the admirable bre.vity and simplicity of such little 
glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon 
him through the windows of the train; little glimpses 
that have a character all their own; sights seen as a 
travelling swallow might see them from the wing, or 
Iris as she went abroad over the land on some Olym- 
pian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children 
huzzah and wave their hands to the express ; but for the 
most part, it is an interruption too brief and isolated 
to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from 
browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of 
a canal-boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly 
or the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to over- 
throw the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds 
of tons of coal and wood and iron have been precipitated 
roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not 
a tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that 
she has been even conscious of its passage. Herein, I 
think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel. The 
speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the 
scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes 
full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and 
while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of 
carriages,, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, 



ORDERED SOUTH 3 

at unfrequented stations ; they make haste up the poplar 
alley that leads toward the town; they are left behind 
with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, 
he watches the long train sweep away into the golden 
distance. 

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock 
of wonder and delight with which he will learn that 
he has passed the indefinable line that separates South 
from North. And this is an uncertain moment, for some- 
times the consciousness is forced upon him early, on 
the occasion of some slight association, a color, a flower, 
or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, 
he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through 
the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly au- 
dible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, 
however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, 
as do so many others of the same family. It will leave 
him wider awake than it found him, and give a new 
significance to all he may see for many days to come. 
There is something in the mere name of the South that 
carries enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the 
word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to 
seek out beauties and to get by heart the permanent lines 
and character of the landscape, as if he had been told 
that it was all his own — an estate out of which he had 
been kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive 
in free and full possession. Even those who have never 
been there before feel as if they had been; and every- 
body goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and 
finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one 
would think they were coming home after a weary ab- 
sence, instead of travelling hourly farther abroad. 

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down 
in his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to under- 
stand the change that has befallen him. Everything 



4 ORDERED SOUTH 

about him is as he had remembered, or as he had an- 
ticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the 
olive gardens and the blue sea. Nothing can change the 
eternal magnificence of form of the naked Alps behind 
Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the 
railvray, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of 
one bay after another along the whole reach of the 
Riviera. And of all this, he has only a cold head 
knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He recog- 
nizes with his intelligence that this thing and that thing 
is beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to con- 
fess that it is not beautiful for him. It is in vain that 
he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain that he chooses 
out points of view, and stands there, looking with all 
his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure 
that he remembers in other days, as the sick folk may 
have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of 
Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading about with 
him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by 
who is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved 
up to the measure of the occasion; and that some one 
is himself. The world is disenchanted for him. He 
seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and 
to see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied 
fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found 
and struck them. He cannot recognize that this phleg- 
matic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes 
burdened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick 
and delicate and alive. 

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness 
and amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the 
rigors of the winter at home, these dead emotions would 
revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness and 
silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is 
homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery 



ORDERED SOUTH 5 

of the frost upon his window-panes at morning, the re- 
luctant descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs 
relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of 
which these yearnings are made is of the flimsiest: if 
but the thermometer fall a little below its ordinary 
Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the 
snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes 
upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the 
grim wintry streets at home returns to him, and begins 
to haunt his memory. The hopeless, huddled attitude 
of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of barefoot 
children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy 
streets toward afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the 
poor defined by the clinging of wet garments; the high 
canorous note of the northeaster on days when the 
very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such 
as these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substi- 
tute themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which 
he had pleased himself awhile before. He cannot be 
glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others 
could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down 
for a little in the sunshine, and those children warm 
their feet, this once, upon a kindlier earth; if only there 
were no cold anj^where, and no nakedness, and no hun- 
ger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with 
him ! 

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. 
If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into 
his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings 
with it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very 
rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional 
returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours 
he will be stirred and awakened by many such ; and they 
will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a 
friend once said to me, the "spirit of delight" comes 



6 ORDERED SOUTH 

often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in 
beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes 
sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, 
when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape 
joylessly for days together, in the very home-land of 
the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand 
times and one ; and on the thousand and second it will 
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendor 
of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that 
we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth 
saw the daffodils by the lake-side. x\nd if this falls out 
capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with 
the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and 
be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold 
earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be 
transmuted into color so rich and odor so touchingly 
sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen 
relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a 
meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of 
an olive garden ; and something significant or monumental 
in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint color 
that is always characteristic of the dress of these south- 
ern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and 
awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell our- 
selves that we are the richer by one more beautiful ex- 
perience. Or it may be something even slighter: as 
when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets 
lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, 
is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation — as 
he changes the position of his sunshade — of a yard or 
two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, 
there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive yards 
themselves. Even the color is indeterminate and con- 
tinually shifting: now you would say it was green, now 
gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud 



ORDERED SOUTH 7 

on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness ; and now, at 
the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and 
broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. 
But every one sees the world in his own way. To some 
the glad moment may have arrived on other provoca- 
tions; and their recollection may be most vivid of the 
statelj^ gait of women carrying burdens on their heads ; 
of tropical effects with canes and naked rock and sun- 
light; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy- 
looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they 
were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; 
of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over 
the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the em- 
purpled hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the 
green-gold air of the east at evening. 

There go many elements, without doubt, to the mak- 
ing of one such moment of intense perception; and it 
is on the happy agreement of these many elements, on 
the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole 
delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget 
how, when he has chanced upon some attitude of com- 
plete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro 
on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the landscape 
has been changed for him, as though the sun had just 
broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, 
by some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? 
And not only a change of posture — a snatch of perfume, 
the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse 
of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a trav- 
elling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver 
along the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's body — not 
one of the least of these but has a hand somehow in the 
general effect, and brings some refinement of its own 
into the character of the pleasure we feel. 

And if the external conditions are thus varied and 



8 ORDERED SOUTH 

subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. 
No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from be- 
ginning to end, because the world is in his heart ; and so 
it is impossible for any of us to understand, from begin- 
ning to end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances 
that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, 
precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden 
from us forever in the constitution of our own bodies. 
After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear 
or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some 
sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, 
or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the 
brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as 
the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We 
admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet what 
is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that 
gathers together these scattered details for its delight, 
and makes out of certain colors, certain distributions of 
graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole 
which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relat- 
ing in one of his essays how he went on foot from one 
great man's house to another's in search of works of art, 
begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy 
owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their 
costly possessions than they were ; because they had paid 
the money and he had received the pleasure. And the 
occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the 
one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the 
other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An 
inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in 
either case; only the one man has made for himself a 
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living 
spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I re- 
peat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the 
better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long 



ORDERED SOUTH 9 

run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. And 
yet even this is not a good unmixed; and like all other 
possessions, although in a less degree, the possession of 
a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and 
made into the prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings 
with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. 
The happiness of such a one comes to depend greatly 
upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and 
harmonize the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a 
degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would 
be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him 
the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare mo- 
ments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him 
wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, 
and disenchantment of the world and life. 

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life 
of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those 
excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove 
too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the 
barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white 
town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely 
fold of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures 
his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccesible 
to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The 
sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully ; and 
after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of 
the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the re- 
strictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes 
pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented 
prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid 
race of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy 
that circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. 
He sees the country people come and go about their 
everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly 
pleasure parties; the stir of man's activity is all about 



10 ORDERED SOUTH 

him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered cor- 
ner; and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality 
of interest^ such as a man may feel when he pictures 
to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the 
robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night. 

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of 
other men, there is no inliarmonious prelude to the last 
quietude and desertion of tlie grave; in this dulness of 
the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final 
insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality 
comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, 
less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infini- 
tesimal gradation, and the last step on a long decline 
of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every 
moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the 
attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us 
at a stride and we move no more, so desire after desire 
leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the 
circle of his activity grows ever narrower ; and he feels, 
if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from tlie passion of 
life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, 
that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly 
and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the 
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a 
mild approach as this ; not to hale us forth with vio- 
lence, but to persuade us from a place we have no further 
pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that ap- 
proaches as life that withdraws and withers up from 
round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, 
and almost his own enjoyment; and if there is to be 
no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong 
and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him 
always like a thing read in a book or remembered out 
of the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably night- 
fall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a 



ORDERED SOUTH 11 

twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but 
steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray 
for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate 
or slay. 

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world 
are many and kindly. The sight of children has a 
significance for him such as it may have for the aged 
also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel 
humanely, and to look upon life somewhat more widely 
than from the narrow loophole of personal pleasure and 
advancement, it is strange how small a portion of his 
thoughts will be changed or embittered by this prox- 
imity of death. He knows that already, in English 
counties, the sower follows the ploughman up the face 
of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; and he 
knows also that he may not live to go home again and 
see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut down at last, 
and brought home with gladness. And yet the future 
of this harvest, the continuance of drought or the com- 
ing of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. 
For he has long been used to wait with interest the 
issue of events in which his own concern was nothing; 
and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful for a fam- 
ine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, 
the equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there 
remain unaltered all the disinterested hopes for man- 
kind and a better future which have been the solace 
and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond 
the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and 
it makes small difference whether he die five thousand 
years, or five thousand and fifty years, before the good 
epoch for which he faithfully labors. He has not deceived 
himself; he has known from the beginning that he fol- 
lowed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself 
in the wilderness, and that it was reserved for others 



12 ORDERED SOUTH 

to enter joyfully into possession of the land. And so, 
as everything grows grayer and quieter about him, and 
slopes toward extinction, these unfaded visions accom- 
pany his sad decline, and follow him, with friendly 
voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of 
death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved 
him, in his days of health, more strongly than these 
generous aspirations move him now ; and so life is car- 
ried forward beyond life, and a vista kept open for the 
eyes of hope, even when his hands grope already on the 
face of the impassable. 

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of 
his friends ; or shall we not say rather, that by their 
thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and 
love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life, be- 
yond the power of bodily dissolution to undo.^ In a 
thousand ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much 
of Etienne de la Boetie survived during all the years 
in which Montaigne continued to converse with him on 
the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what 
was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited 
places that knew him no more, and found no better con- 
solation than the promise of his own verses, that soon 
he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what 
it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride 
and pleasure in calling ours, it will sometimes seem to 
us as if our friends, at our decease, would suffer loss 
more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who should 
care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the 
map or through the report of his vicegerents, than 
for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are 
we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we 
have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their 
thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, 
belongs to us, than about the real knot of our identity — 



ORDERED SOUTH 13 

that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are 
immediately aware — or the diligent service of arteries 
and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which 
we know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be 
the source and substance of the whole? At the death 
of every one whom we love, some fair and honorable 
portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged 
from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, 
perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series 
of such impoverishments, till their life and influence 
narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own 
spirits, and Death, when he comes at last, can destroy 
them at one blow. 

Note. — To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two 
of quahfication ; for this is one of the points on which a shghtly 
greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom: 

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from partic- 
ular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing 
butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance 
of the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice 
and love. As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly 
of man's action in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly 
of his own in the particular. He has not that same unspeakable 
trust in what he would have done had he been spared, seeing 
finally that that would have been little; but he has a far 
higher notion of the blank that he will make by dying. A 
young man feels himself one too many in the world; his is a 
painful situation; he has no calling; no obvious utility; no ties, 
but to his parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do 
not think that a proper allowance has been made for this true 
cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a pro- 
longed existence, we outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. 
Eitner we become so callously accustomed to our own useless 
figure in the world, or else — and this, thank God, in the ma- 
jority of cases — ^we so collect about us the interest or the love 
of our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of 
life, that we need to entertain no longer the question of our 
right to be. 

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself 
dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view ex- 
pressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to help, 
some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to punish. These 



14 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the man himself. 
It is he, not another, who is one woman's son and a second 
woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life which 
began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into 
the lives of others. It is not indispensable; another will take 
the place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the 
better the man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be 
tempted to regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion 
of his personality. To have lived a generation, is not only to 
have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have 
assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age, has, for all 
but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. A 
man does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a 
future that is never to be his; but beholding himself so early 
a deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he 
might have done already. To have been so useless and now 
to lose all hope of being useful any more — there it is that death 
and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, 
founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily 
from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, 
his friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; 
how shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career 
which was his only business in this world, Mhich was so fitfully 
pursued, and which is noM' so ineffectively to end? 



ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT 

PLACES 

(1874) 

It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given 
place, and we have much in our own power. Things 
looked at patiently from one side after another generally 
end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months 
ago some words were said in the Portfolio as to an 
"austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was 
then recommended as "healthful and strengthening to 
the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the present 
essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be under- 
stood, is something more than a mere walk before break- 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 15 

fast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in 
some unsightly neighborhood, and especially if we have 
come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we 
must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the 
ardor and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day 
by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing Nature 
more favorably. We learn to live with her, as people 
learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell 
lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against 
all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to 
come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as 
Brantome quaintly tells us, ''fait des discours en soi pour 
se soutenir en chemin" ; and into these discourses he 
weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by 
the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying 
character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings different 
thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow 
lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor 
does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the 
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our 
humors as through differently colored glasses. We are 
ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, 
and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is 
no fear for the result, if we can but surrender our- 
selves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and fol- 
lows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts 
or telling ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. 
We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty ; we 
are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere 
character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in 
others. And even where there is no harmony to be 
elicited by the quickest and most obedient of spirits, we 
may still embellish a place with some attraction of ro- 
mance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and 
handle them lightly when we have found them. Some- 



16 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

times an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many 
a spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations^ by 
a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Dick 
Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. 
And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Tros- 
sachs for most tourists if a man of admirable romantic 
instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious 
figures^ and brought them thither with minds rightly pre- 
pared for the impression. There is half the battle in this 
preparation. For instance: I have rarely been able to 
visits in the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable 
places of our own Highlands. I am happier where it 
is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without 
trees. I understand that there are some phases of men- 
tal trouble that harmonize well with such surroundings, 
and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the 
imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and 
put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, 
unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these 
savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to 
cliarm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul ; 
and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me 
but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the 
right humor for this sort of landscape, and lose much 
pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only 
let alone, and time enough were given, I should have 
all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beau- 
tiful images away with me when I left. When we can- 
not think ourselves into sympathy with the great features 
of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head 
among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times to- 
gether, over the changeful current of a stream. We 
come down to the sermon in stones, when we are shut 
out from any poem in the spread landscape. We begin 
to peep and botanize, we take an interest in birds and 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 17 

insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The 
reader will recollect the little summer scene in Wuther- 
ing Heights — the one warm scene, perhaps, in all that 
powerful, miserable novel — and the great feature that is 
made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sun- 
shine: this is in the spirit of which I now speak. And, 
lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as 
beautiful, often more picturesque, than the shows of the 
open air, and they have that quality of shelter of which 
I shall presently have more to say. 
^ With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to 
put forth the paradox that any place is good enough 
I to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those 
t]iighly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably. 
For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home 
in the neighborhood. Reminiscences spring up, like 
flowers, about uninteresting corners. We forget to some 
degree the superior loveliness of other places, and fall 
into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own 
reward and justification. Looking back the other day 
on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to 
find how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks 
in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, 
to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years 
in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination. 
The country to which I refer was a level and treeless 
plateau, over which the winds cut like a whip. For 
miles on miles it was the same. A river, indeed, fell 
into the sea near the town where I resided; but the 
valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up 
as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were roads, 
certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, 
as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of 
surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from 
the beginning: there was nothing left to* fancy, noth- 



18 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

ing to expect^ nothing to see by the wayside, save here 
and there an unhomely looking homestead, and here 
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you 
were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, 
by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the reso- 
nant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had 
learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by 
the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and 
make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the 
waste places by the side of the road were not, as Haw- 
thorne liked to put it, ''taken back to Nature" by any 
decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had 
the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain 
tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, colored 
like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue trans- 
parent air; but this was of another description — this 
was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to 
know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold. 

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. In- 
deed, this had passed into the speech of the inhabi- 
tants, and they saluted each other when they met with 
"Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" 
of farther south. These continual winds were not like 
the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure 
against your face as you walk, and serves to set all 
the trees talking over your head, or bring round you 
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a 
shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, 
that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes 
the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their 
own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to 
see them brandish great masses of shadow. And what 
a power they have over the color of the world ! How 
they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and 
make them shudder and whiten like a single willow ! 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 19 

There is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this 
among the woods, with all its sights and noises; and 
the effect gets between some painters and their sober 
eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is 
calm, the foliage is colored like foliage 'in a gale. There 
was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a 
country where there were no trees and hardly any 
shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or those 
of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was never- 
theless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you 
taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a 
place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I 
mean; he must remember how, when he has sat him- 
self down behind a dyke on a hillside, he delighted to 
hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his 
back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and 
it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow sur- 
prise, that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, 
and the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. 
Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the "Prelude," 
has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by 
the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the 
great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned 
the other way with as good effect: 

"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, 
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn 
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook. 
Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud!" 

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told 
me of what must have been quite the most perfect 
instance of this pleasure of escape. He had gone up, 
one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathe- 
dral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathe- 
dral, the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and 
after a long while in dark stairways, he issued at last 



20 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. 
At that elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale 
was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had 
forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and dur- 
ing his long ascent; and so j^ou may judge of his sur- 
prise when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade 
and looking over into the Place far below him, he saw 
the good people holding on their hats and leaning hard 
against the wind as they walked. There is something, 
to my fancy, quite perfect in this little experieAce of 
my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always 
very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a 
church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, 
and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened 
buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; 
but how much more must they not have seemed so to 
him as he stood, not only above other men's business, 
but above other men's climate, in a golden zone like 
Apollo's ! 

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country 
of which I write. The pleasure was to be out of the 
wind, and to keep it in memory all the time, and hug 
oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea 
that any such sheltered places were to be found. Be- 
tween the black worm-eaten headlands there are little 
bights and havens, well screened from the wind and the 
commotion of the external sea, where the sand and 
weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of 
tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flicker- 
ing from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and 
the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on 
my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's 
edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted 
a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi- 
detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 21 

their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the 
other as he stood in his own doorway. There is some- 
thing in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of 
tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and 
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the 
two hall-fires at night, when the sea boomed against the 
foundations and the wild winter wind was loose over 
the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct 
for ourselves some pale figure of wliat life then was. 
Not %o when we are there; when we are there such 
thoughts come to us only to intensify a contrary im- 
pression, and association is turned against itself. I 
remember walking thither three afternoons in succes- 
sion, my eyes weary with being set against the wind, 
and how, dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, 
I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. 
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an 
enemy," was seemingly quite local. It carried no 
clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that it 
did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, 
black and ruinous as the rocks about them, were still 
distinguishable from these by something more insecure 
and fantastic in the outline, something that the last 
storm had left imminent and the next would demolish 
entirely. It would be difficult to render in words the 
sense of peace that took possession of me on these three 
afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said, by the 
contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by 
previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the 
insane strife of the pygmies who had erected these two 
castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and en- 
mity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this 
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in 
my eyes ; and yet there were the two great tracts of 
motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, un- 



22 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

concerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present 
moment and the memorials of the precarious past. 
There is ever something transitory and fretful in the 
impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it 
seems to have no root in the constitution of things ; 
it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a 
cut flower. And on those days the thought of the wind 
and the thought of human life came very near together 
in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments 
in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the 
face of that great field of stationary blue, was as the 
wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of the sea 
was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks 
of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place 
one learned to understand the phrase. Looking down 
into these green waters from the broken edge of the 
rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed 
to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; 
and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind 
ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of a 
fish far below, they settled back again (one could fancy) 
with relief. 

On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything 
was so subdued and still that the least particular struck 
in me a pleasurable surprise. The desultory crackling 
of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the ear. 
The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been satu- 
rated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it 
into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. 
I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French 
verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my sur- 
roundings and give expression to the contentment that 
was in me, and I kept repeating to myself — 

"Mon coeur est \m liith suspendu, 
Sitot qn'on le louche, il resonne." 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 23 

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at 
this time ; and for that very cause I repeat them here. 
For all I knovi^, they may serve to complete the impres- 
sion in the mind of the reader, as they were certainly 
a part of it for me. 

And this happened to me in the place of all others 
where I liked least to stay. When I think of it I grow 
ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out of the strong 
came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty 
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of 
peace. I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the 
earth, in that little corner, was all alive and friendly 
to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something 
to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet 
pleasant faces of men and women, and see beautiful 
flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the 
corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, 
there is no country without some amenity — let him only 
look for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find. 



WALKING TOURS 

(1876) 

It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some 
would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way 
of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing 
landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite 
of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But 
landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He 
who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in 
quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humors — 
of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at 
morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the 



24. WALKING TOURS 

evening's rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his 
knapsack on^ or takes it off, with more delight. The 
excitement of the departure puts him in key for that 
of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward 
in itself, but will be further rewarded in the sequel; 
and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless 
chain. It is this that so few can understand; they will 
either be always lounging or always at five miles an 
hour; they do not play off the one against the other, 
prepare all day for the evening, and all evening for 
the next day. And, above all, it is here that your over- 
walker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against 
those who drink their cura9oa in liqueur glasses, when 
he himself can swill it in a brown John. He will not 
believe that the flavor is more delicate in the smaller 
dose. He "will not believe that to walk this uncon- 
scionable distance is merely to stupefy and brutalize 
himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of 
frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness 
in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening 
of the temperate walker ! He has nothing left of man 
but a physical need for bedtime and a double nightcap; 
and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be savorless 
and disenchanted. It is the fate of such a one to take 
twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, 
and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of the 
proverb, in short, who goes farther and fares worse. 

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should 
be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even 
in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but 
name; it is something else and more in the nature of 
a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, 
because freedom is of the essence; because you should 
be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, 
as the freak takes you ; and because you must have your 



WALKING TOURS 25 

own pace_, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, 
nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be 
open to all impressions and let your thoughts take color 
from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any 
wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Haz- 
litt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When 
I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the coun- 
try/' — which is the gist of all that can be said upon 
the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at 
your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the 
morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he can- 
not surrender himself to that fine intoxication that 
comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in 
a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends 
in a peace that passes comprehension. 

During the first day or so of any tour there are 
moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels more 
than coldly toward his knapsack, when he is half in a 
mind to throw it bodily over the hedge and, like Chris- 
tian on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on 
singing." And yet it soon acquires a property of easi- 
ness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of the journey 
enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the 
straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are 
cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a 
shake, and fall at once into your stride. And surely, 
of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the 
road, is the best. Of course, if he will keep thinking 
of his anxieties, if he will open the merchant Abudah's 
chest and walk arm-in-arm with the hag — why, wher- 
ever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances 
are that he will not be happy. And so much the more 
shame to himself ! There are perhaps thirty men set- 
ting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large 
wager there is not another dull face among the thirty. 



26 WALKING TOURS 

It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of dark- 
ness, one after another of these wayfarers, some sum- 
mer morning, for the first few miles upon the road. 
This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, 
is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up at his 
loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to 
words. This one peers about, as he goes, among the 
grasses ; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon- 
flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot 
look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes 
another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself. 
His face changes from tim£ to time, as indignation 
flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He 
is composing articles, delivering orations, and conduct- 
ing the most impassioned interviews, by the w^ay. A 
little farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin 
to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be no 
great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid 
peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely 
know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse 
to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the un- 
feigned alarm o-f your clown. A sedentary population, 
accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing 
of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself 
the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man who 
was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, although 
a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as he 
went like a cliild. And you would be astonished if I 
were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who 
have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they 
sang — and sang very ill — and had a pair of red ears 
when, as described above, the inaus23icious peasant 
plumped into their arms from round a corner. And 
here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is Haz- 
litt's own confession, from his essay On Going a Jour- 



WALKING TOURS 27 

ney, which is so good that there should be a tax levied 
on all who have not read it: 

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head/' says 
he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding 
road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner — 
and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some 
game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I 
sing for joy." 

Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend with the 
policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to 
publish that in the first person.^ But we have no 
bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pre- 
tend to be as dull and foolish as our neighbors. It was 
not so with Hazlitt. And notice how learned he is (as, 
indeed, throughout the essay) in the theory of walking 
tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple stock- 
ings, who walk their iifty miles a day: three hours' 
march is his ideal. And then he must have a winding 
road, the epicure ! 

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of 
his, one thing in the great master's practice that seems 
to me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leap- 
ing and running. Both of these hurry the respiration; 
they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open- 
air confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven 
walking is not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts 
and irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have 
fallen into an equable stride, it requires no conscious 
thouglit from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents 
you from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like 
knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually 
neutralizes and sets to sleep the serious activity of the 
mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and laugh- 
ingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning 
doze ; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and 



28 WALKING TOURS 

trifle in a thousand ways with words and rhymes; but 
when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather 
ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the 
trumpet as loud and long as we please ; the great barons 
of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each 
one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and 
brooding on his own private thought ! 

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much 
variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the 
start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change 
is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller 
moves from the one extreme toward the other. He 
becomes more and more incorporated with the material 
landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon 
him with great strides, until he posts along the road, 
and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. 
The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is 
the more peaceful. A man does not make so many 
articles toward the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but 
the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical well- 
being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time 
the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the 
absence of the others, and bring him to his destination 
still content. 

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You 
come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep 
ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and 
down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink 
into yourself, and the birds come round and look at 
you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon 
under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm 
upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and 
turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you 
must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long 
as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if the 



WALKING TOURS 29 

millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our 
clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember 
time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a 
lifetime is, I was going to say, to live forever. You 
have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly 
long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by 
hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. 
I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, 
where no one knows more of the days of the week than 
by a sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where 
only one person can tell you the day of the month, 
and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware 
how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what 
armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the 
bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would 
be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a 
variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, 
and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, 
as though they were all in a wager. And all these 
foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along 
with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there 
were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days 
before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no 
appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. 
"Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," 
says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot de- 
prive him of his covetousness." And so I would say 
of a modern man of business, you may do what you 
will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of 
life — he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his busi- 
ness habits. Now, there is no time when business habits 
are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so 
during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free. 
But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best 
hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked 



30 WALKING TOURS 

as those that follow a good day's march; the flavor of 
the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry 
and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the 
evening with grog, you will own there was never such 
grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about 
your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read 
a book — and you will never do so save by fits and starts 
— you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; 
words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the 
ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears 
himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence 
of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had 
written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on 
such occasions we look back with special favor. "It was 
on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous 
precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new 
Heldise, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of 
sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote 
more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, 
we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a 
volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket- 
book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's 
songs; and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair 
experience. 

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing 
better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the 
sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch 
the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, 
that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that 
audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, 
you feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether 
you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with 
pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk 
with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it 
seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of any- 



WALKING TOURS 31 

thing else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curi- 
osity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of 
science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch 
provincial humors develop themselves before you, now 
as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like 
an old tale. 

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for 
the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the 
fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering past 
pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been 
"haj^py thinking." It is a phrase that may well per- 
plex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks 
and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming 
dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many 
far-off projects to realize, and castles in the fire to 
turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that 
we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land 
of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed 
times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the 
fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most 
of us, when we find we can pass the hours without dis- 
content, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste 
to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to 
make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence 
of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these 
are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall in love, 
we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like 
frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, 
when all is done, you would not have been better to sit 
by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit 
still and contemplate, — to remember the faces of w^omen 
without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men 
without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sym- 
pathy, and yet content to remain where and what you 
are — is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and 



32 WALKING TOURS 

to dwell with happiness? After all^ it is not they who 
carry flags, but they who. look upon it from a private 
chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once 
you are at that, you are in the very humor of all social 
heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty 
words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, 
riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you 
go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which 
seem so vain in the eyes of Philistijies perspiring after 
wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken 
with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face 
of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences 
between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such 
as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of 
money or a fiddlestick's end. 

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking 
whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious 
pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of con- 
tent ; when suddenly the mood changes, the weather- 
cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question 
more: whether, for the interval, you have been the 
wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys? 
Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at least 
you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all 
the kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or 
foolish, to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and 
mind, into some different parish of the infinite. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

I 

(1876) 

With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's 
characters are what we call marrying men. Merciitio, 
as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron. would 
have come to the same end in the long run. Even I ago 
had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. 
People like Jacques and the Fool in Lear, although we 
can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single 
out of a cynical humor or for a broken heart, and not, 
as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and 
preference for the single state. For that matter, if 
you turn to George Sand's French version oi As You 
Like It (and I think I can promise you will like it but 
little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as Or- 
lando marries Rosalind. 

At least there seems to have been much less hesita- 
tion over marriage in Shakespeare's days; and what 
hesitation there was was of a laughing sort, and not 
much mpre serious, one way or the other, than that of 
Panurge.. In modern comedies the heroes are mostly 
_of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as much in 
earnest, and not one-quarter so confident. And I take 
this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is. 
They know they are only human after all; they know 
what gins and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the 
shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the 
cross-roads. They would wish to keep their liberty; 
but if that may not be, why, God's will be done ! "What, 

33 



34 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

are you afraid of marriage?" asks Cecile, in Maitre 
Guer'in. "Oh, mon Dieu, non !" replies Arthur; "I 
should take chloroform." They look forward to mar- 
riage much in the same way as they prepare themselves 
for death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Per- 
haps, and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man 
is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his 
heart. That splendid scoundrel, INIaxime de Trailles, 
took the news of marriages much as an old man hears 
the deaths of his contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," 
he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair at 
Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous mari- 
ons tons !" Every marriage was like another gray hair 
on his head; and the jolly church bells seemed to taunt 
him with his fifty years and fair round belly. 

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than 
our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to 
marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so 
is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of men 
are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know 
all the time that one friend will marry and put you to 
the door; a second accept a situation in China, and be- 
come no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and 
an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a 
third will take up with some religious crotchet and 
treat you to sour looks thenceforward. So, in one way 
or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the 
goodly fellowships forever. The very flexibility and 
ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while 
they endure, make them the easier to destroy and for- 
get. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has 
a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), 
cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness 
reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate — a death, 
a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 35 

bright eyes — he may be left, in a montli, destitute of 
all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead 
of on two or three, you stake your happiness on one 
life onl}^ But still, as the bargain is more explicit and 
complete on your part, it is more so on the other; and 
you have not to fear so many contingencies ; it is not 
every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; 
and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you will 
always have a friend at home. People who share a cell 
in the Bastille, or are thrown together on an uninhabited 
island, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will 
find some possible ground of compromise. They will 
learn each other's ways and humors, so as to know where 
they must go warily, and where they may lean their 
whole weight. The discretion of the first years be- 
comes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom 
and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into one. 
But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It 
certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous 
men. In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, 
and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. 
It is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with 
Rosamond Vincy, but w^hen Ladislaw marries above 
him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified. The 
air of the* fireside withers out all the fine wildings of 
the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy 
that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to* every- 
thing else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he 
would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first 
duty is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure 
by laying down vintages and husbanding the health of 
an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was 
equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for 
neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak with- 
out constraint; vou will not wake him. It is not for 



36 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor and Marcus 
Aurelius married ill. For women, there is less of this 
danger. Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens 
out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the 
way of so much more freedom and usefulness, that, 
whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss 
some benefit. It is true, however, that some of the 
merriest and most genuine of women are old maids; 
and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily 
married, have often most of the true motherly touch. 
And this would seem to show, even for women, some 
narrowing influence in comfortable married life. But 
the rule is none the less certain: if you wish the pick 
of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good 
wife. 

I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages 
are passably successful, and so few come to open fail- 
ure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle 
on which people regulate their choice. I see women 
marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and 
ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and men dwelling in con- 
tentment with noisy scullions, or taking into their lives 
acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say the 
good people marry because they fall in love; and of 
course you may use and misuse a word as much as you 
please, if you have the world along with you. But love 
is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for such 
lukewarm preference. It is not here, anyway, that I-,ove 
employs his golden shafts ; he cannot be said, with any 
fitness of language, to reign here and, revel. Indeed, if 
this be love at all, it is plain the poets have been fooling 
with mankind since the foundation of the world. And 
you have only to look these happy couples in the face, 
to see they have never been in love, or in hate, or in 
any other high passion, all their days. When you see 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 37 

a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your affec- 
tions upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch it 
with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel 
quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by 
some one else. I have used the phrase "high passion." 
Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as 
generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after 
marriage that some poor fellow, is dying of his wife's 
love. "What a pity!" he exclaims; "you know' I could 
so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very 
happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me 
the sweet story of his loves. "I like it well enough as 
long as her sisters are there'," said this amorous swain; 
"but I don't know what to do' when we're alone." Once 
more: A married lady was debating the subject with 
another lady. "You know, dear," said the first, "after 
ten years of marriage, if he is nothing else, your hus- 
band is always an old friend." "I have many old 
friends," returned the. other, "but I prefer them to be 
nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might yrefer that also !" 
There is a common note in these three illustrations of 
the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes 
among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You 
wonder whether it was so always ; whether desire was 
always equally dull and spiritless, and possession 
equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, 
ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as 
Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother William anent 
her friend. Miss Gay. It is" so charmingly comical, and 
so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases. 
"The young lady is in every sense formed to make one 
of your disposition really happy. She has a pleasing 
voice, with which she accompanies her musical instru- 
ment with judgment. She has an easy politeness in 
her manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good 



38 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a gen- 
erous disposition. As to her internal accomplishments, 
I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good 
sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment without 
a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as 
my William likes, struck me with a wish that she was 
my William's wife." That is about the tune: pleasing 
voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal ac- 
complishments after the style of the copy-book, with 
about as much religion as my William likes; and then, 
with all speed, to church. 

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell 
in love, most people would die unwed; and among the 
others, there would be not a few tumultuous households. 
The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suit- 
able for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect 
love is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, 
a good domestic sentiment. Like other violent excite- 
ments, it throws up not only what is best, but what is 
worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as some 
people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent 
under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody, 
jealous, and exacting when they a^e in love, who are 
honest, downright, good-hearted fellows eilough in the 
everj'day affairs and humors of the world. 

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis 
that people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is 
it they choose so well? One is almost tempted to hint 
that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in 
fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have 
made up your mind to it, and once talked yourself 
fairly over, you could "pull it through" with anybody. 
But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if 
we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recog- 
nized by the police, there must be degrees in the free- 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 39 

dom and sympathy realized, and some principle to 
guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should 
this principle be? Are there no more definite rules 
than are to be found in the Prayer-book? Law and 
religion forbid the bans on the ground of propinquity 
or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; 
and in all this most critical matter, has common-sense, 
has wisdom, never a word to say? In the absence of 
more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between 
friends : even a few guesses may be of interest to youths 
and maidens. 

In all that concerns eating and drinking, comj^any, 
climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be 
souglit for. It would be trying, for instance, to keep 
bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In 
matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no conse- 
quence. Certainly it is of none in the companionships 
of men, who will dine more readily with one who has a 
good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, than 
with another who shares all their favorite hobbies and 
is melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that 
is no reason why you should hang your heaHT She 
thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her 
opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be 
a mongrel product out of affectation by dogmatism; and 
felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no 
special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much 
of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of 
him written in very obscure English and wearisoilie to 
read. . And not long ago I was able to lay by my lan- 
tern in content, for I found the honest man. He was 
a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, 
and with an eye for certain poetical effects of sea and 
ships. I am not much of a judge of that kind of thing, 
but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night. 



40 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

How strong, supple^ and living the ship seems upon the 
billows ! With what a dip and rake she shears the fly- 
ing sea ! I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, 
and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit, 
was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of 
the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed 
to have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every 
way than William Shakespeare. If there were more 
people of his honesty, this would be about the staple 
of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful, but 
courage that is rare. And what have we in place .^ How 
many, who think no otherwiser than the young painter, 
have we not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles? 
Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics ! 
when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned 
on you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about 
art is become a function of the average female being, 
which she performs with precision and a sort of haunt- 
ing sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated 
machine. Sometimes, alas ! the calmest man is carried 
away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, 
and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments. 
When you remember that, you will be tempted to put 
things strongly, and say you will marry no one who is 
not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a 
distaste for poetry and painting. 

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have 
spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathema- 
ticians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old 
gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each under- 
stood the word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. 
Try as I might, I could get no nearer the principle of 
their division. What was essential to them, seemed to 
me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise 
as to what was, or what was not, important in the life 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 41 

of man. Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back 
in a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, 
with different mountain-tops along the sky-line and 
different constellations overhead. We had each of us 
some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than 
anything else, and which discolored all* experience to 
its own shade. How would you have people agree, 
when one is deaf and the other blind .^ Now this is 
where there should be community between man and 
wife. They should be agreed on their catchword in 
''facts of religion/' or "facts of science," or "society, 
my dear" ; for without such an agreement all intercourse 
is a painful strain upon the mind. "About as much 
religion as my William likes," in short, that is what is 
necessary to make a happy couple of any William and 
his spouse. For there are differences which no habit 
nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not 
intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as 
Mrs. Samuel Budgett, the wife of the successful mer- 
chant ! The best of men and the best of women may 
sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want of 
some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other 
lost spirits to the end. 

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for 
people who would spend years together and not bore 
themselves to death. But the talent, like the agreement, 
must be for and about life. To dwell happily together, 
they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and 
born with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman 
must be talented as a woman, and it will not much mat- 
ter although she is talented in nothing else. She must 
know her metier de femme, and have a fine touch for 
the affections. And it is more important that a person 
should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly 
of common friends and the thousand and one nothings 



42 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of the day and hour, than that she should speak with 
the tongues of men and angels; for awhile together by 
the hre, happens more frequently in marriage than the 
presence of a distinguished foreigner to dinner. That 
people should laugh over the same sort of jests, and 
have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room/' many 
an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor 
custom stale, is a better preparation for life, by your 
leave, than many other things higher and better sound- 
ing in the world's ears. You could read Kant by your- 
self, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with 
some one else. You can forgive people' who do not fol- 
low you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find 
your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or 
staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go 
some way toward a dissolution of the marriage. 

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, 
could never so much as understand the meaning of the 
word politics, and has given up trying to distinguish 
Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, 
ask her about other men or women and the chicanery 
of everyday existence — the rubs, the tricks, the vanities 
on which life turns — and you will not find many more 
shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer 
what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of 
the higher and more poetical understanding, frank in- 
terest in things for their own sake, and enduring aston- 
ishment at the most common. She is not to be deceived 
by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it 
is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder her- 
self crazy over the human eyebrow*. Now in a world 
where most of us walk very contentedly in the little lit 
circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of 
what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions — 
earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 43 

mid-air at a seance, and the like — a mind so fresh and 
unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will own I 
think if, a better sort of mind than goes necessarily with 
the clearest views on public business. It will wash. It 
will find something to say at an odd moment. It has 
in it the spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas* 
I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my 
jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes^ although 
my companion on the other side of the hearth held the 
most enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot. 
The question of professions_, in as far as they regard" 
marriage, was only interesting to women until of late 
days, but it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could 
help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The 
practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; 
and after an hour or two's work, all the more human 
portion of the author is extinct; he will bully, backbite, 
and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better. 
But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; 
because so much of the labor, after your picture is once 
begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that skilled 
sort of manual labor which offers a continual series of 
successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into 
good-humor. Alas ! in letters there is nothing of this 
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, 
you have always something else to think of, and cannot 
pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they are be- 
side the mark, and the first law stationer could put you 
to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of 
penmanship, even made it a source of livelihood, when 
he copied out the Helo'ise for dilettante ladies; and 
therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which 
guided him among so many thousand follies and insani-' 
ties. It would be well for all of the genus irritabih 
thus to add something of skilled labor to intangible 



4i VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

brain-work. To find the right word is so doubtful a 
success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satis- 
faction in a year of it; but we all know when we have 
formed a letter j3erfectly; and a stupid artist, right or 
wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right 
tone or a right color, or made a dexterous stroke with 
his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors; 
and the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tran- 
quillizing influence" of the green earth, counterbalance 
the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, and 
prosaic. 

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a mar- 
riage of love, for absences are a good influence in love 
and keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst 
man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too 
frequently torn open and the solder has never time to 
set. Men who fish, botanize, work with the turning- 
lathe, or gather sea-weeds, will make admirable hus- 
bands; and a little amateur painting in water-color 
shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a 
few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim 
loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the 
street, who can number an infinity of acquaintances and 
are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an 
easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I 
will not say they are the best of men, but they are the 
stuff out of which adroit and capable women manufac- 
ture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that those 
who have loved once or twice already are so much the 
better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of 
fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shy- 
ness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilizing. 
Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman 
should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. 
It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 45 

Michekt calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet 
rails against it because it renders you happy apart from 
thought or work; to provident women this will seem no 
evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man 
in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy 
and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for loung- 
ing and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic 
happiness. 

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will 
probably amuse him more when lie differs than when 
he agrees with them; at least they will do no harm, for 
nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of 
more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and de- 
cisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its 
very awfulness. They have been so tried among the 
inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for 
islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, 
that they will risk all for solid ground below their feet. 
Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary bark 
upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were 
the royal road through life, and realized, on the instant, 
what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when 
the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the 
desire of living. They think it will sober and change 
them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy 
it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamor for- 
ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, 
spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave 
a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling 
and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in 
this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses. 



46 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 



II 

(1881) 

Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our exist- 
ence. From first to last, and in the face of smarting 
disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better 
health, and better conduct; and that so confidently, that 
we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it im- 
probable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, con- 
duct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like 
Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I have 
my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very ready 
to believe that I shall combine all these various ex- 
cellences in my own person, and go marching down to 
posterity with divine honors. There is nothing so mon- 
strous but we can believe it of ourselves. About our- 
selves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have 
dwelt by choice in a delicious vagueness from our boy- 
hood up. No one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer's 
aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die temporarily !" Or, 
perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the two 
pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, 
their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime 
of stealing." Here we recognize the thoughts of our 
boyhood; and our boyhood ceased — well, when.^- — not, 
I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty- 
five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, 
we are still in the thick of that Arcadian period. For 
as the race of man, after centuries of civilization, still 
keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 47 

individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is 
already old and honored, and Lord Chancellor of Eng- 
land. We advance in years somewhat in the manner 
of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we 
have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an 
outpost, and still keep open our communications with 
the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. 
There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, 
but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grand- 
father William can retire upon occasion into the green 
enchanted forest of his boyhood. 

The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous 
irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in ques- 
tions of conduct. There is a character in the Pilgrim's 
Progress, one Mr. Linger-after-Lust, with whom I 
fancy we are all on speaking terms ; one famous among 
the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the 
moment of defeat; one who, after eighty years of con- 
trary experience, will believe it possible to continue in 
the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft. 
Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable 
turning-point in our career. Any overt act, above all, 
is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A drunk- 
ard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not 
help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue 
to make and break his little vows? And yet I have not 
heard that he was discouraged in the end. By such 
steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid 
fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is 
stinging. 

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you 
can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There 
is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sancti- 
monious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man un- 
changed. This is a hard saying, and has an air of para- 



48 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

dox. For there is something in marriage so natural and 
inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity 
and ease; it offers to bury forever many aching preoc- 
cupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar com- 
pany through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of 
the blest and passive kind of love, rather than* the bless- 
ing and active; it is approached not only through the 
delights of courtship, but by a public performance and 
repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it 
will go hard with him if he cannot be good and fortu- 
nate and happy within such august circumvallations. 

And yet there is probably no other act in a man's 
life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. 
For years, let us suppose, you have been making the 
most indifferent business of your career. Your experi- 
ence has not, we may dare to say, been more encour- 
aging than Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have 
seen and desired the good that you were not able to ac- 
complish; like them, you have done the evil that you 
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold 
sweat, according to your habit of body, remembering, 
with dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts and 
sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to with- 
draw entirely from this game of life; as a man who 
makes nothing but misses withdraws from that less 
dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen back upon 
the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for 
your misdemeanors, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that 
3^ou were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you 
have been made aM^are of what was beautiful and amia- 
ble, wise and kind, in the other part of your behavior; 
and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the contra- 
diction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you 
have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if 
you are only a man in the making, you have recognized 



I 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 49 

that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself 
not guilty of your own pestiferous career. 

Granted;, and with all my heart. Let us accept these 
apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy 
but your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral 
cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with 
the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one 
thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree: — 
we can never agree to have you marry. What ! you 
have had one life to manage, and have failed so 
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to con- 
join with it the management of some one else's? Be- 
cause you have been unfaithful in a very little, you pro- 
pose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip 
yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations 
and excuses. You are no longer content to be your own 
enemy; you must be your wife's also. You have been 
hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel 
blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since 
you came there by no choice or movement of your own. 
Now, it appears, you must take things on your own 
authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and 
for all thr.t your wife suffers, no one is responsible but 
you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere 
he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a 
dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way 
in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and 
yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blind- 
fold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is your wife, 
you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness 
you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You 
would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or 
bad investment. If she were to marry some one else, 
how you would tremble for her fate ! If she were only 
your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how 



50 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no 
better than yourself ! 

Times are changed with him who marries ; there are 
no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently 
linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty 
to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and 
even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different 
aspect when you have a wife to support. Suppose, after 
you are married, one of those little slips were to befall 
you. What happened last November might surely hap- 
pen February next. They may have annoyed you at 
the time, because they were not what you had meant; 
but how vrill they annoy you in the future, and how will 
they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and 
peace ! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the 
chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particu- 
larly realizing; you did not care, in those days, to make 
a fetish of your conscience ; you would recognize your 
failures with a nod, and so, good-day. But the time for 
these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a 
witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and 
can no longer close the mindjs eye upon uncomely pas- 
sages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon 
your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, 
but the victim of your sins; not only can she condemn 
you to the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share 
feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once more, 
with what temerity you have chosen precisely her to be 
your spy, whose esteem you value highest, and whom 
you have already taught to think you better than you 
are. You may think you had a conscience, and believed 
in God; but what is a conscience to a wife.^ Wise men 
of yore erected statues of their deities, and consciously 
performed their part in life before those marble eyes. 
A god watched them at the board, and stood by their 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 51 

bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about 
their ancient cities, where they bought and sold, or 
where tiiey piped and wrestled, there would stand some 
symbol of the things that are outside of- man. These 
were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which 
told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same 
lesson, if you will — but how harrowingly taught ! — when 
the woman you respect shall weep from your unkindness 
or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor girls in 
Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you 
cannot set aside your wife. To marry is to domesticate 
the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is 
nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good. 

And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem 
than mere single virtue ; for in marriage there are' two 
ideals to be realized. A girl, it is true, has always lived 
in a glass house among reproving relatives, whose word 
was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judg- 
ments and take the key submissively from dear papa; 
and it is wonderful how swiftly she can change her tune 
into the husband's. Her morality has been, too often, 
an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case 
of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of 
privacy and freedom, his moral judgments have been 
passed in some accordance with his nature. His sins 
were always sins in his own sight; he could then only 
sin when he did some act against his clear conviction; 
the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was 
single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit 
put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this com- 
parative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdic- 
tions. It no longer matters so much how life appears 
to one; one must consult another: one, who may be 
strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The 
only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make 



52 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

a bull for once) my wife. For her, and for her only, 
I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly 
about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of 
compromise, to keep honor bright and abstain from base 
capitulations.^ How are you to put aside love's plead- 
ings ? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn sud- 
denly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these 
years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey 
who has found you out? In this temptation to mutual 
indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in mar- 
ried life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first 
ideal, and for awhile continue to accept these change- 
lings with a gross complacency. At last Love wakes 
and looks about him; finds his hero sunk into a stout 
old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine 
divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of 
that first disenchantment, flees forever. 

Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, 
and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when 
this is the case, although it makes the firmer marriage, 
a thick additional veil of misconception hangs above the 
doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat 
rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman myself, I 
dare say I should hold the reverse; and at least we all 
enter more or less wholly into one or other of these 
camps. A man who delights women by his feminine 
perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a chance 
explosion of the under side of man; and the most mas- 
culine and direct of women will some day, to your dire 
surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive 
lengths of personation. Alas ! for the man, knowing 
her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall 
flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for 
truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, 
eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 53 

and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not 
to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. And in the 
good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life, which 
pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this 
difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. 
Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats 
nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, 
and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough in- 
fidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may 
be a little devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a 
tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste 
for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George 
Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire 
she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion 
figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for 
the education of young men. That doctrine of the ex- 
cellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as 
well as false. It is better to face the fact, and know, 
when you marry, that you take into your life a creature 
of equal, if of unlike, frailties ; whose weak human heart 
beats no more tunefully than yours. 

But it is the object of a liberal education not only 
to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to 
magnify the natural differences between the two. Man 
is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but prin- 
cipally by catchwords; and the little rift between the 
sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one 
set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. 
To the first, there is shown but a very small field of 
experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for 
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is 
more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is 
proportionately widened. They are taught to follow 
different virtues, to hate different vices, to place their 
ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. 



54 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

What should be the result of such a course? When a 
horse has run away, and the two flustered people in the 
gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we know 
the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, 
when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and 
fiddled in a dancing measure into that most* serious con- 
tract, and setting out ujoon life's journej'^ with ideas so 
monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some 
make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the 
boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl 
will shudder at as a debasing vice; what is to her the 
mere common-sense of tactics, he will spit out of his 
mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties 
must this green couple steer their way; and contrive to 
love each other; and to respect, forsooth; and be ready, 
when the time arrives, to educate the little men and 
women who shall succeed to their places and per- 
plexities. 

And yet, when all has been said, the man who should 
hold back from marriage is in the same case with him 
who runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion for 
our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push 
forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray 
God that we be not led into temptation; but not lawful 
to skulk from those that come to us. The noblest pas- 
sage in one of the noblest books of this century, is where 
the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall 
and but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero,* With- 
out some such manly note, it were perhaps better to 
have no conscience at all. But there is a vast difference 
between teaching flight, and showing points of peril 
that a man may march the more warily. And the true 
conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on appre- 
hensions, and embrace that shining and courageous vir- 
* Brownini:»''s The King and the Book. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 55 

tue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant 
fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is 
the grave, experienced, yet smiling man, Hope lives 
on ignorance ; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowl- 
edge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the 
frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified 
success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes 
honorable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a 
kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, 
and early learned humility. In the one temper, a man 
is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights 
of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of 
his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year 
has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags 
of honor. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; 
in the last, he knows that she is like himself — erring, 
thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled 
with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned 
with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school 
with hope; /but ere you marry, should have learned the 
mingled lejsson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with 
sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope 
and love address themselves to a perfection never real- 
ized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of 
life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, per- 
fect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have 
a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and 
that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy 
condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some 
generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, 
and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will 
constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily 
forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be 
wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for 
the faults of married people continually spur up each 



56 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love 
upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, 
there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage 
and console. 



Ill 

ox FALLING IN LOVE 

(1877) 
"Lord, what fools these mortals be !" 

There is only one event in life which really astonishes 
a man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. 
Everything else befalls him very much as he expected. 
Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety in- 
deed, but with little that is either startling or incense; 
they form together no more than a sort of background, 
or running accompaniment to the man's own reflections; 
and he falls naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling 
habit of mind, and builds himself up in a conception of 
life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of 
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the 
vagaries of his friends and acquaintances under the in- 
fluence of love. He may sometimes look forward to it 
for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But 
it is a subject in which neither intuition nor the be- 
havior of others will help the philosopher to the truth. 
There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly 
written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the 
person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a well- 
known French theorist, who was debating a point 
eagerly in his cenacle. It was objected against him that 
he had never experienced love. Whereupon he arose, 
left the society, and made it a point not to return to it 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 57 

until he considered that he had supplied the defect. 
"Now/' he remarked^ on entering, "now I am in a po- 
sition to continue the discussion." Perhaps he had not 
penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but 
the story indicates right thinking, and may .serve as an 
apologue to readers of this essay. 

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not 
without something of the nature of dismay that the man 
finds himself in such changed conditions. He has to 
deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy dis- 
likes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed 
his days ; and he recognizes capabilities for pain and 
pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the exist- 
ence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the 
one thing of which we are tempted to think as super- 
natural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect 
is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, 
neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beauti- 
ful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's 
eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the 
experience of either with no great result. But on this 
occasion all is different. They fall at once into that 
state in which another person becomes to us the very 
gist and centerpoint of God's creation, and demolishes 
our laborious theories with a smile ; in which our ideas 
are so bound up with the one master-thought that even 
the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts 
of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into 
a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and 
desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their 
acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, 
with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can 
see in that woman, or such-a-one in that man? I am 
sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I can- 
not think what the women mean. It might be very 



58 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all 
over into life_, and step forward from the pedestal with 
that godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten change- 
lings who call themselves men, and prate intolerably 
over dinner-tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy 
to inspire love — no, nor read of any, except Leonardo 
da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About 
women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but 
there, I have the misfortune to be a man. 

There are many matters in which you may waylay 
Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, 
high thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal 
more that forms a part of this or the other person's 
spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost 
any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is 
by no means in the way of every one to fall in love. 
You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into when 
Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaif in love/ I 
do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. 
Scott, if it were not for a passage or two in Rob Roy, 
would give me very much the same effect. These are 
great names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, 
healthy, high-strung, and generous natures, of whom 
the reverse might have been expected. As for the in- 
numerable army of anaemic and tailorish persons who 
occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety, 
it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any such situ- 
ation as a love-affair. A wet rag goes safely by the 
fire ; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much 
impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, 
many lovable people miss each other in the world, or 
meet under some unfavorable star. There is the nice 
and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From 
timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible 
love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 59 

do there cease and determine. A very adroit person, 
to be sure, manages to prepare the way and out with 
his declaration in the nick of time. And then there is 
a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub; 
and if he has to declare forty times, will continue im- 
perturbably declaring, amid the astonished consideration 
of men and angels, until he has a favorable answer. I 
dare say, if one were a woman, one would like to marry 
a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one 
who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and 
somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages in which 
one of the parties has been thus battered into consent 
scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love 
should run out to meet love wnth open arms. Indeed, 
the ideal story is that of two people who go into love 
step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair 
of children venturing together into a dark room. From 
the first moment when they see each other, with a pang 
of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleas- 
ure and embarrassment, they can read the expression 
of their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here 
no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so 
plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it 
is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the 
woman's. 

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial 
as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence 
of years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, 
and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man 
had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence 
of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus 
he turned his back upon the strong sunny parts of 
nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively on 
what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, 
let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and 



60 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully fore- 
went these advantages. He joined himself to the fol- 
lowing of what, in the old mythology of love, was pret- 
tily called nonchaloirj and in an odd mixture of feelings, 
a fling of self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, 
and a great dash of that fear with which honest people 
regard serious interests, kept himself back from the 
straightforward course of life among certain selected 
activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, 
like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, 
which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last 
year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregu- 
larly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard 
or felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of 
his memory, he must have lived his past life between 
sleep or waking, or with the preoccupied attention of 
a brown study. He is practically incommoded by the 
generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, 
and develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the 
moon and stars. But it is not at all within the province 
of a prose essayist to give a picture of this hyperbolical 
frame of mind; and the thing has been done already, 
and that to admiration. In Adelaide^ in Tennyson's 
Maud, and in some of Heine's songs, you get the abso- 
lute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and 
Juliet were very much in love ; although they tell me 
some German critics are of a different opinion, probably 
the same who would have us think JMercutio a dull fel- 
low. Poor Antony was in love, and no mistake. That 
lay figure Marius, in Les Miserahles, is also a genuine 
.case in his own way, and worth observation. A good 
many of George Sand's people are thoroughly in love; 
and so are a good many of George Meredith's. Alto- 
gether, there is plenty to read on the subject. If the 
root of the matter be in him, and if he has the requisite 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 61 

chords to set in vibration, a young man may occasion- 
ally enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah 
which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight 
of the City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch 
delightful hopes and perilous illusions. 

One thing that accompanies the passion in its first 
blush is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do 
not quite see how) that from having a very supreme 
sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to 
sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing 
to be — the lover begins to regard his happiness as bene- 
ficial for the rest of the world and highly meritorious 
in himself. Our race has never been able contentedly 
to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a 
few young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable 
star, does not re-echo among the courts of Heaven with 
quite a formidable effect. In much the same taste, 
when- people find a great to-do in their own breasts, 
they imagine it must have some influence in their neigh- 
borhood. The presence of the two lovers is so enchant- 
ing: to each other that it seems as if it must be the best 
thing possible for everybody else. They are half in- 
clined to fancy it is because of them and their love that 
the sky is blue and the sun shines. x\nd certainly the 
weather is usually fine w^hile people are courting. . . . 
In point of fact, although the happy man feels very 
kindly toward others of his own sex, there is apt to be 
something too much of the magnifico in his demeanor. 
If people grow presuming and self-important over such 
matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely 
support the dizziest elevation in life without some sus- 
picion of a strut ; and the dizziest elevation is to love 
and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers 
are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. 
An overweening sense of the passion and importance 



62 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To 
women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very gen- 
erously, as if they were so many Joan of Arcs; but this 
does not come out in their behavior ; and they treat tliem 
to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. 
I am not quite certain that women do not like this sort 
of thing; but really, after having bemused myself over 
Daniel Deronda, I have given up trying to understand 
what they like. 

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous 
superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow 
blessed to others, and everybody is made happier in 
their happiness, would serve at least to keep love gen- 
erous and great-hearted. Nor is it quite a baseless 
superstition after all. Other lovers are hugely inter- 
ested. They strike the nicest balance between pity and 
approval, when they see people ajDing the greatness of 
their own sentiments. It is an understood thing in the 
play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on 
the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and 
a light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the 
footman and the singing chambermaid. As people are 
generally cast for the leading parts in their own imagi- 
nations, the reader can apply the parallel to real life 
without much chance of going wrong;. In short, they 
are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep- 
seated as their own, but they like dearly to see it going 
forward. And love, considered as a spectacle^^ must 
have attractions for many who are not of the confra- 
ternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace 
of the novelists ; and he must be rather a poor sort of 
human being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty 
madness without indulgence and sympathy. For nature 
commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; 
the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 63 

and you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you 
will^ but you cannot help some emotion when you read 
of well-disputed battles^ or meet a pair of lovers in 
the lane. 

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the 
world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true 
as between the sweethearts. To do good and communi- 
cate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness 
of the other that makes his own most intense ffratifica- 
tion. It is not possible to disentangle the different emo- 
tions, the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are 
excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. 
To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel 
in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the 
character and attributes and make them imposing in 
the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but 
to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And 
it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers ; 
for the essence of love is kindness ; and indeed it may be 
best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to 
speak, run mad and become importunate and violent. 
Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer. The 
lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying 
his weak points and having them, one after another_, 
accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured that 
he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for 
himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive 
to set forward. For, although it may have been a very 
difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write 
the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more 
difficult piece of art before every one in this world who 
cares to set about explaining his own character to others. 
Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true 
significance; and they are all the language we have to 
come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it, as a 



64 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

rule. For better or worse^ people mistake our meaning 
and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And gen- 
erally we rest pretty content with our failures ; we are 
content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but 
when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of 
love, he makes it a point of honor to clear such dubieties 
away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon 
a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at 
being loved in a mistake. 

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former 
periods of his life. To all that has not been shared 
with her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispo- 
sitions, he can look back only by a difficult and re- 
pugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted 
some years in ignorance of what alone was really im- 
portant, that he may have entertained the thought of 
other women with any show of complacency, is a bur- 
den almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the 
thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like 
a poisoned wound. That he himself made a fashion of 
being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain 
meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience. 
But that She should have permitted herself the same 
liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine providence. 

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score 
that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically in- 
convenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on 
which it merely attends, like an ill-humored courtier, 
is itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the 
same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objec- 
tion is that jealousy has not always been a character of 
man; formed no part of that very modest kit of senti- 
ments with which he is supposed to have begun the 
world; but waited to make its appearance in better 
days and among richer natures. And this is equally 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 65 

true of love^ and friendship, and love of country, and 
delight in what they call the beauties of nature, and 
most other things worth having. Love, in particular, 
will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have 
fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts 
in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in 
other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the 
strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything 
seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in 
comparison. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the conse- 
quences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; 
but there it is. 

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when 
we reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of 
letters found after years of happy union creates no 
sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain 
a man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar 
doubt of each other: but this pre-existence of both oc- 
curs to the mind as something indelicate. To be alto- 
gether right, they should have had twin birth together, 
at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. 
Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and with- 
out reserve or afterthought. Then they would under- 
stand each other with a fulness impossible otherwise. 
There would be no barrier between them of associa- 
tions that cannot be imparted. They would be led into, 
none of those comparisons that send the blood back to 
the heart. And they v/ould know that there had been 
no time lost, and they had been together as much as 
was possible. For besides terror for the separation that 
must follow some time or other in the future, men feel 
anger, and something like remorse, when they think of 
that other separation which endured until they met. 
Some one has written that love makes people believe in 
immortality, because there seems not to be room enough 



66 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

in life for so great a tenderness^ and it is inconceivable 
that the most masterful of our emotions should have no 
more than the spare moments of a few years. Indeed, 
it seems strange ; but if we call to mind analogies, we 
can hardly regard it as impossible. 

"The blind bow-boy/' who smiles upon us from the 
end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails 
his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as 
fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disap- 
pears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this 
one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to 
make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they 
are all the things of a moment. When the generation 
is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years' 
panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from tlie stage 
of the world, we may ask what has become of these 
great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweethearts 
who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and 
they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, 
a few actions worth remembering, and a few children 
who have retained some happy stamp from the dispo- 
sition of their parents. 



IV 

TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 

(1879) 

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being 
wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a 
half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally 
combined with the error, one of the grossest and broad- 
est conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to 
tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it 



VIRGIN IBUS PUERISQUE 67 

were. But the truth is one ; it has first to be discovered, 
then justly and exactly uttered. Even with instruments 
specially contrived for such a purpose — with a foot rule, 
a level, or a theodolite — it is not easy to be exact; it is 
easier, alas ! to be inexact. From those who mark the 
divisions on a scale to those who measure the bounda- 
ries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, 
it is by careful method and minute, unwearying atten- 
tion that men rise even to material exactness or to sure 
knowledge even of external and constant things. But it 
is easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the 
changing appearance of a face ; and truth in human 
relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: 
hard to seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts 
in a loose, colloquial sense — not to say that I have been 
in Malabar when as a matter of fact I was never out of 
England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the 
original when "as a matter of fact I know not one sylla- 
ble of Spanish — this, indeed, is easy and to the same 
degree unimportant in itself. Lies of this sort, accord- 
ing to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a 
certain sense even they may or may not be false. The 
habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly 
with his wife and friends ; while another man who never 
told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself 
one lie — heart and face, from top to bottom. This is 
the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa, 
veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your 
own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify 
emotion — that is the Iruih which makes love possible 
and mankind happy. 

L'art de bien dire is but a drawing-room 'accomplish- 
ment unless it be pressed into the service of the truth. 
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write 
what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect 



68 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

him precisely as you wish. This is commonly under- 
stood in the case of books or set orations ; even in making 
3'our will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty 
is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never 
make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which 
3^et lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their 
wits as a high flight of metaphysics — namely, that the 
business of life is mainly carried on by means of this 
difficult art of literature, and according to a man's pro- 
ficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the fulness 
of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is sup- 
posed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their 
notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue 
to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have 
been reading — Mr. Leland's captivating English Gip- 
sies. "It is said," I find on p. 7, "that those who can 
converse with Irish peasants in their own native tongue 
form far higher opinions of their appreciation of the 
beautiful, and of the elements of humor and pathos in 
their hearts, than do those who know their thoughts 
only through the medium of English. I know from my 
own observations that this is quite the case with the 
Indians of North America, and it is unquestionably so 
with the gipsy." In short, where a man has not a full 
possession of the language, the most important, because 
the most amiable, qualities of his nature have to lie 
buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and 
the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very "ele- 
ments of humor and pathos." Here is a man opulent 
in both, and for lack of a medium he can put none of 
it out to interest in the market of affection ! But what 
is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of 
a foreign language is partially true even with the tongue 
we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different 
dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 69 

and meagre ; but the speech of the ideal talker shall 
correspond and fit upon the truth of fact — not clumsily, 
obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly ad- 
hering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the result? 
That the one can open himself more clearly to his 
friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly 
valuable — intimacy with those he loves. An orator 
makes a false step ; he employs some trivial, some ab- 
surd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he 
insults, by a side wind, those whom he is laboring to 
charm; in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously 
ruffles another in parenthesis ; and you are not surprised, 
for you know his task to be delicate and filled with 
perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance !" 
As if yourself, when you seek to explain some misunder- 
standing or excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly 
and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not 
harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if your- 
self required less tact and eloquence; as if an angry 
friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to offend 
than a meeting of indifferent politicians ! Nay, and the 
orator treads in a beaten round ; the matters he discusses 
have been discussed a thousand times before; language 
is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut 
and dry vocabulary. But you — may it not be that your 
defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much 
as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like 
a pioneer, you must- venture forth into zones of thought 
still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary inno- 
vator? For even in love there are unlovely humors; 
ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have 
sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could 
read your heart, you may be sure that he would under- 
stand and pardon ; but, alas ! the heart cannot be shown 
— it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think 



70 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

it is a hard thing to write poetry ? Why, that is to write 
poetry, and of a high, if not the highest, order. 

I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic 
literary labors" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up 
in words their loves and their contentions, and speaking 
their autobiography daily to their wives, were it not 
for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my 
admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is 
not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject 
to physical passions and contortions^the voice breaks 
and changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning 
inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open 
book; things that cannot be said look eloquently through 
the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a 
dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing 
signals.. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush 
or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the 
heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. 
The message flies by these interpreters in the least space 
of time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the 
moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time 
and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical 
epochs of a close relation, patience and justice are not 
qualities on which we can rely. But the look or the 
gesture explains things in a breath; the'y"tell their mes- 
sage without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot 
stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an illusion that 
should steel your friend against the truth; and then 
they have a higher authority, for they are the direct 
expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through 
the unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not long ago 
I wrote a letter to a friend which came near involving 
us in quarrel; but we met, and in personal talk I re- 
peated the worst of what I had written, and added worse 
to that; and with the commentary of the body it seemed 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 71 

not unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, letters 
are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an absence is 
a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each 
other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so 
preserve the attitude of their affections that they may 
meet on the same terms as they had parted. 

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the 
face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the 
changes of the voice. And there are others also to be 
pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent 
nature, who have been denied all the symbols of com- 
munication, who have neither a lively play of facial ex- 
pression, nor speaking gestures,, nor a responsive voice, 
nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people 
truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which 
no one can undo. They are poorer than the gypsy, for 
their heart can speak no language under heaven. Such 
people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, 
or through yea and nay communications; or we take 
them on trust on the strength of a general air, and now 
and again, when wef see the spirit breaking through in 
a flash, correct or change our estimate. But these will 
be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the 
end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. 
Some minds, romantically dull, despise physical endow- 
ments. That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those 
who like their fellow-creatures it must always be mean- 
ingless ; and, for my part, I can see few things more de- 
sirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as 
honor and humor and pathos, than to have a lively and 
not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond 
with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in per- 
son, so that we shall please even in the intervals of ac- 
tive pleasing, and may never discredit speech with 
uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own bur- 



72 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

lesques. But of all unfortunates there is one creature 
(for I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfor- 
tune. This is he who has forfeited his birthright of ex- 
pression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has 
taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every 
■ side perverted or cut off his means of communication 
/with his fellow-men. The body is a house of many 
windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying 
on the passers-by to come and love us. But this fellow 
has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly col- 
ored. His house may be admired for its design, the 
crowd may pause before the stained windows, but mean- 
while the poor proprietor must lie languishing within, 
uncomforted, unchangeably alone. 

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than 
to refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid false- 
hood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to 
answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea 
and nay communications implies a questioner with a 
share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual 
love. Yea and nay mean nothing; the meaning must 
have been related in the question. Many words are 
often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for 
in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most 
that we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far 
off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, 
for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, 
back and forward, to convey the purport of a single 
principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt, 
pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, pro- 
legomenous babbler will often add three new offences 
in the process of excusing one. It is really a most deli- 
cate affair. The world was made before the English 
language, and seemingly upon a different design. Sup- 
pose we held our converse not in words, but in music; 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 73 

those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off 
from all near commerce, and no better than foreigners 
in this big world. But we do not consider how many 
have "a bad ear" for words, nor how often the most 
eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and 
questions ; there are so few that can be spoken to with- 
out a lie. "Do you forgive me?'* Madam and sweet- 
heart, so far as I have gone in life, I have never yet 
been able to discover what forgiveness means. "Is it 
still the same between us?" Why, how can it be? It 
is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend of 
my heart. "Do you understand me?" God knows; I 
should think it highly improbable. 

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man 
may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his 
teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend 
or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have per- 
ished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that 
unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to 
betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the re- 
lation, has but hung his head and held his tongue ? And, 
again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed 
through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to 
sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in 
answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A 
fact may be an exception ; but the feeling is the law, and 
it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The 
whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning 
of each separate statement; the beginning and the end 
define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You 
never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of 
liis own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, 
is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true im- 
pression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true 
veracity. To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical dis- 



74 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 

cretion is often needful^ not so much to gain a kind 
hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have 
an ill name in this connection; yet they live in as true 
relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of 
her heart. 

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most use- 
ful passage I remember to have read in any modern 
author,* "two to speak truth — one to speak and another 
to hear." He must be very little experienced, or have 
no great zeal for truth, who does not recognize the fact. 
A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces 
strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to 
remark offence. Hence we find those who have once 
quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready 
to break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral 
equality or else no respect; and hence between parent 
and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal 
fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. 
And there is another side to this, for the parent begins 
with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed 
in early years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; 
to this he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with 
his preconception ; and wherever a person fancies him- 
self unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up 
the effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on 
the other hand, and still more between lovers (for 
mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth is 
easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by 
the other. A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the 
gist of long and delicate explanations ; and where the 
life is known even yea and nay become luminous. In 
the closest of all relations — that of a love well founded 
and equally shared — speech is half discarded, like a 

* A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Wednesday, 

p. 233. 



VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 76 

roundabout, infantile process or a ceremony of formal 
etiquette ; and the two communicate directly by their 
presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive 
to share their good and evil and uphold each other's 
hearts in joy. P'or love rests upon a physical basis; 
it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from 
voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort out- 
run knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with 
the acquaintance ; and as it was not made like other 
relations, so it is not, like them, to be perturbed or 
clouded. Each knows more than can be uttered; each 
lives by faith, and believes by a natural compulsion; 
and between man and wife the language of the body is 
largely developed and grown strangely eloquent. The 
thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress 
would only lose to be set down in words — ay, although 
Shakespeare himself should be the scribe. 

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, 
that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let 
but a doubt arise, and alas ! all the previous intimacy 
and confidence is but another charge against the person 
doubted. ''What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I 
have been deceived so long and so completely!'' Let 
but that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a 
deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is your 
crime ! Make all clear, convince the reason ; alas ! spe- 
ciousness is but a proof against you. ''If you can abuse 
me now, the more likely that you have abused me from 
the first/' 

For a strong affection such moments are worth sup- 
porting, and they will end well; for your advocate is in 
your lover's heart, and speaks her own language; it is 
not you but she herself who can defend and clear you 
of the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a 
less stringent union .^ Indeed, is it worth while .'^ We 



76 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

are all incompris , only more or less concerned for the 
mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning 
at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. 
Sometimes we catch an eye — this is our opportunity in 
the ages — and we wag our tail with a poor smile. "Is 
that all?" All.^ If you only knew! But how can they 
know } They do not love us ; the more fools we to 
squander life on the indifferent. 

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to 
hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand 
others that we can get our own hearts understood; and 
in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the 
most successful pleader. 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

(1877) 

"Boswell: We grow weary when idle. 

"JoHNsoisr: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want 
company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; 
we should all entertain one another." 

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a 
decree in absence convicting them of Zese-respectability, 
to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein 
with something not far short of enthusiasm,- a cry from 
the opposite party who are content when they have 
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, 
savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this 
should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist 
in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized 
in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as 
good a right to state its position as industry itself. It 
is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 77 

enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at 
once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. 
A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determina- 
tion, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Ameri- 
canism, "goes for" them. And while such a one is 
ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to 
understand his resentment, when he perceives cool per- 
sons in the meadows by the w^ayside, lying with a hand- 
kerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. 
Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the dis- 
regard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having 
taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured 
into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting 
silent and unmoved by their success.^ It is a sore thing 
to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, 
and when all is done, find humanity indifierent to your 
achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; 
financiers have only a superficial toleration for those 
who know little v>f stocks ; literary persons despise the 
unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to dis- 
parage those who have none. 

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is 
not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for 
speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coven- 
try for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with 
most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to 
remember this is an apology. It is certain that much 
may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only 
there is something to be said against it, and that is 
what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state 
one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, 
and that a man has written a book of travels in Monte- 
negro, is no reason why he should never have been to 
Richmond. 

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a 



78 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 



1 



good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a 
Lord Macaulay may escape from school honors with all 
his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their 
medals that they never afterward have a shot in their 
locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same 
holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, 
or suffering others to educate him. It must have been a 
very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at 
Oxford in these words: ''Young man, ply your book 
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for 
when years come upon you, you will find that poring 
upon books will be but an irksome task." The old 
gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other 
things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few 
become impossible, by the time a man has to use spec- 
tacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are 
good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty 
bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, 
like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with 
your back turned on all the bustle and glamor of reality. 
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote re- 
minds us, he will have little time for thoughts. 

If you look back on your own education, I am sure 
it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry 
that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack- 
lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. 
For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures 
in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a 
top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that 
Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. 
But though I would not willingly part with such scraps 
of science, I do not set the same store by them as by 
certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open 
street while I was playing truant. This is not the 
moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 79 

which was the favorite school of Dickens and of Balzac, 
and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the 
Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this; 
if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he 
has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always 
in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the 
gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on 
some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable 
pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird 
will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a 
vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspec- 
tive. Why, if this be not education, what is.^ We may 
conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such a one, 
and the conversation that should thereupon ensue: — 

"How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here.''" 

"Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 

"Is this not the hour of the class? and should'st thou 
not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou 
mayest obtain knowledge?" 

"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your 
leave." 

"Learning, quotha ! After what fashion, I pray thee ? 
Is it mathematics ?" 

"No, to be sure." 

"Is it metaphysics?" 

"Nor that." 

"Is it some language?" 

"Nay, it is no language." 

"Is it a trade?" 

"Nor a trade neither." 

"Why, then, what is't?" 

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go 
upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commoiJj 
done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest 
Sloughs and Thickets on the Road ; as also, what manner 



80 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, 
by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which 
my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." 

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved 
with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threat- 
ful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, 
quotha !" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged 
by the Hangman !" 

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat 
with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads 
its feathers. 

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. 
A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it 
does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. 
An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with 
a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, 
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. 
It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a 
well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as 
he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single 
great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go 
hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should 
read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or 
in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in 
the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, 
looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with 
a smile on his face all the time, will get more true educa- 
tion than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There 
is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found 
upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but 
it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, 
that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of 
life. Wliile others are filling their memory with a 
lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget 
before the week be out, your truant may learn some 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 81 

really useful art: to play the fiddle_, to know a good 
cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all vari- 
eties of men. Many who have "plied their book dili- 
gently," and know all about some one branch or another 
of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient 
and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, stockish, and dys- 
peptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many 
make a large fortune, who remain underbred and 
pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there 
goes the idler, who began life along with them — by 
your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take 
care of his health and his spirits ; he has been a great 
deal in the open air, which is the most salutory of all 
things for both body and mind; and if he has never 
read the great Book in very recondite places, he has 
dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. 
Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and 
the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share 
of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of 
Living .f^ Nay, and the ilder has another and more im- 
portant quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He 
who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of 
other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with 
only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard 
among the dogmatists. '^He will have a great and cool 
allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he 
finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself 
with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him 
along a by-road, not much frequented, but very even 
and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and 
leads to the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he 
shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; 
and while others behold the East and West, the Devil 
and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort 
of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an 



82 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

army of shadows running speedily and in many different 
directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The 
shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the 
plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and empti- 
ness ; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the 
Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful lanscape; 
many firelit parlors ; good people laughing, drinking, and 
making love as they did before the Flood or the French 
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under 
the hawthorn. 

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk 
or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a 
faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a 
strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of 
dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely 
conscious of living except in the exercise of some con- 
ventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the 
country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how 
they pine for their desk or their study. They have 
no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to ran- 
dom provocations ; they do not take pleasure in the exer- 
cise of their faculties for its own sake ; and unless Neces- 
sity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand 
still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot 
be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they 
pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedi- 
cated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they 
do not require to go to the office, when they are not 
hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing 
world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour 
or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their 
eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was 
nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would 
imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very 
possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 83 

have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a» turn of 
the market. They have been to school and college, but 
all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have 
gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, 
but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. 
As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they 
have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work 
and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless 
attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, 
and not one thought to rub against another while they 
wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might 
have clambered on the boxes ; when he was twenty, he 
would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is 
smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits 
bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This 
does not appeal to me as being Success in Life. 

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from 
his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends 
and relations, and down to the very people he sits with 
in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion 
to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by 
perpetual neglect of many other things. And it ^'s not 
by any means certain that a man's business is the most 
important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate 
it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, 
and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the 
Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and 
pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. 
For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, 
singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the or- 
chestra, but those who look on and clap their hands 
from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil im- 
portant offices toward the general result. You are no 
doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and 
stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey 



84 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 

you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who 
walk the streets for your protection; but is there not 
a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other 
benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your 
way, or season your dinner with good company ? Colonel 
Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bay- 
ham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet 
they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. 
And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, 
I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases 
whom the world could better have done without. Haz- 
litt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation 
to Northcote, who had never done him anything he 
could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostenta- 
tious friends ; for he thought a good companion emphati- 
cally the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in 
the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has 
been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But 
this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six 
sheets of letter-paper covered with the most entertain- 
ing gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, 
perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think 
the service would be greater, if he had made the manu- 
script in his heart's blood, like a compact with the 
devil .f* Do you really fancy you should be more be- 
holden to your correspondent, if he had been damning 
you all the while for your importunity.'^ Pleasures are 
more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of 
mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. 
There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a 
score in a j est ; but wherever there is an element of sacri- 
fice, the favor is conferred with pain, and, among gener- 
ous people, received with confusion. There is no duty 
we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By 
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, 



AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 85 

which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they 
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. 
The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the 
street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set 
every one he passed into a good-humor; one of these 
persons, who had been delivered from more than usually 
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him 
some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes 
comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased 
before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. 
For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling 
rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for 
tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared 
to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man 
or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. 
He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their 
entrance into a room is as though another candle had 
been lighted. We need not care whether they could 
prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do- a better 
thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great 
Theorem of the Livableness of Life. Consequently, 
if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, 
idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; 
but thanks to hungjer and the workhouse, one not easily 
to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the 
most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. 
Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, 
I beseech you. [_He sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; 
he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and re- 
ceives a large measure of nervous derangement in re- 
turn. Either he absents himself entirely from all fel- 
lowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet 
slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people 
swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nerv- 
ous system, to discharge some temper before he returns 



86 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 






to workj I do not care how much or how well he works^ 
this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. 
They would be happier if he were dead. They could 
easier do without his services in the Circumlocution 
Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He 
poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared 
out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag- 
ridden by a peevish uncle. 

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about.'* 
For what cause do they embitter their own and other 
people's lives? That a man should publish three or 
thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish 
his great allegorical picture, are questions of little inter- 
est to the world. The ranks of life are full; and al- 
though a thousand fall, there are always some to go 
into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should 
be at home minding women's work, she answered there 
were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your 
own rare gifts ! When nature is "so careless of the 
single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the 
fancy that our own is of exceptional importance.'' Sup- 
pose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some 
dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world 
would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone 
to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to 
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. 
There are not many works extant, if you look the altera- 
native all over, which are worth the price of a pound of 
tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering 
reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even 
a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great 
cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for al- 
though tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities 
necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious 
in themselves. Alas and alas ! you may take it how you 



MS TRIPLEX 87 

will, but the services of no single individual are indis- 
pensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted 
nightmare ! And yet you see merchants who go and 
labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into 
the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling 
at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who 
come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the 
Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine 
young men who work themselves into a decline, and are 
driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would 
you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by 
the Master of the Ceremonies, the* promise of some mo- 
mentous destiny ? and that this lukewarm bullet on whicli 
they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centrepoint 
of all the universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for 
which they give away their priceless youth, for all they 
know, may be chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches 
they expect may never come, or may find them indiffer- 
ent; and they and the world they inhabit are so incon- 
siderable that the mind freezes at the thought. 



^S TRIPLEX 
(1878) 

The changes wrought by death ate in themselves so 
sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their 
consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's ex- 
perience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes 
all other accidents because it is the last of them. Some- 
times it leaps suddenly upon its victims like a Thug; 
sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their 
citadal during a score of years. And when the business 
is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, 



88 ^S TRIPLEX 

and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friend- 
ships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary 
walks, an'd single beds at night. Again, in taking away 
our friends, death does not take them away utterly, 
but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intoler- 
able residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence 
a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the 
mind, from the pj^ramids of Egypt to the gibbets and 
dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons 
have a bit of pageant going toward the tomb; memorial 
stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order 
to preserve some show of respect for what remains of 
our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it 
with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired 
undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much 
more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of 
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; 
nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied 
and laid down with every circumstance of logic; al- 
though in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving 
people little time to think, have not left them time 
enough to go dangerously wrong in practice. 

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken 
of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of 
death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy 
circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South 
America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, 
even in this tremendous neighborhood, the inhabitants 
are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal 
conditions than if they were delving gardens in the 
greenest corner of England. There are serenades and 
suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles over- 
head; and meanwhile the foundation shudders under- 
foot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any 
moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moon- 



MS TRIPLEX 89 

light, and tumble man and his merry-making in the 
dust. In the eyes of very young people, and very dull 
old ones, there is something indescribably reckless and 
desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that 
respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find 
appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long dis- 
tance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell 
of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close 
to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, 
could hardly be relished in such circumstances without 
something like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a 
place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and 
maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in a per- 
petual carouse. 

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the 
situation of these South American citizens forms only 
a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. 
This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over- 
crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling 
blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well 
come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a 
penny squib. And what, pathologically looked at, is 
the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful 
of petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the 
whole economy as the ship's powder-magazine to the 
ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal 
we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. 
If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend 
we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as fright- 
ened as they make out we are, for the subversive acci- 
dent that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the 
hour and no one would follow them into battle — the 
bluepeter might fly at the truck, but who would climb 
into a sea-going ship.'^ Think (if these philosophers 
were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should 



90 MS TRIPLEX 

affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier 
spot than any battle-field in history, where the far 
greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left 
their bones ! What woman would ever be lured into 
marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest 
sea? And what would it be to grow old? For, after 
a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the 
ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us 
and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. 
By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his con- 
tinued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays 
his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelm- 
ing probability that he will never see the day. Do the 
old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They 
were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and 
tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people 
about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was 
a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at 
having outlived some one else; and when a draught 
might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a 
stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old 
hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bub- 
bling with laughter, through years of man's age com- 
pared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and 
peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may 
fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) 
whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to 
plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of 
ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed. 

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, 
with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on 
along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole 
way is one wilderness o-f snares, and the end of it, for 
those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And 
yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the 



MS TRIPLEX 91 

Derby.. Perhaf)s the reader remembers one of th,e 
humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he en- 
couraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his 
bridge over Baiae bay ; and when they were in the height 
of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards 
among the company, an.d had them tossed into the sea. 
This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with 
the transitory race of man. Only, what- a checkered 
picnic we have of it, even while it lasts ! and into what 
great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's 
pale Praetorian throws us over in the end ! 

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the 
cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swalr 
lows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incon- 
gruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, 
incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger- 
beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? 
The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous 
phrases that grow harder to understand the more, we 
think about them. It is a well-known fact that an im- 
mense proportion of boat accidents would never happen 
i.f people held the sheet in their hands instead of making 
it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a pro- 
fessional mariner or some landsman with shattered 
nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it fast. A 
strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen bold- 
ness in the face of death! 

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, 
which we import into daily talk with noble inappropri- 
ateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart from 
its circumstances and some of its consequences to others ; 
and although we have some experience of living, there 
is not a man on earth who has flown so high into ab- 
straction as to have any practical guess at the meaning 



92 ^S TRIPLEX 

of the word life. All literature, from Job and Omar 
Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but 
an attempt to look upon the human state with such large- 
ness of view as shall enable us to rise from the con- 
sideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our 
sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power 
when they say that it is a vapor, or a show, or made 
of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more 
rigid sense, has. been at the same work for ages; and 
after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the prob- 
lem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon an- 
other into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philoso- 
phy has the honor of laying before us, with modest 
pride, her contribution toward the subject: that life 
is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine re- 
sult! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or 
a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility 
of Sensation ! He may be afraid of a precipice, or a 
dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an under- 
taker's man; but not certainly of abstract death. We 
may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until 
we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all 
the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true 
throughout — that we do not love life, in the sense that 
we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation — 
that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, 
but living. Into the views of the least careful there 
will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes 
are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although 
we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, 
wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the 
sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything 
like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; 
nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the 
most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply 



MS TRIPLEX 93 

interested in the accidents of our existence^ to enjoy- 
keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather 
leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck 
against a straw. For surely the love of living is stronger 
in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter 
riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who 
lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the 
interest of his constitution. 

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked 
upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing 
life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so 
short as to be hardly decent ; and melancholy unbelievers 
yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. 
Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their perform- 
ances now and again when they draw in their chairs to 
dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is 
an answer to most standard works upon the question. 
When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a 
great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of 
contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, 
like the Commander's statue ; we have something else 
in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells 
are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and 
every hour, some one is parting company with all his 
aches and ecstacies. For us also the trap is laid. But 
we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain 
the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all 
through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us 
if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of 
ours, to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity 
of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and 
the pride of our own nimble bodies. 

We all of us appreciate the sensations ; but as for 
cari'ftg about the Permanence of the Possibility, a 
man's head is generally very bald, and his senses very 



94 iES TRIPLEX 

dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life 
as a lane leading to a dead wall — a mere bag's end, 
as the French say — or whether we think of it as a 
vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and 
prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; 
whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic 
poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we 
look justly for years of health and vigor, or are about 
to mount into a Bath chair, as a step toward the hearse ; 
in each and all of these views and situations there is 
but one conclusion possible : that a man. should stop his 
ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is 
set before him with a single mind. No one surely could 
have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the 
thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and 
yet we know how little it affected his conduct^ how 
wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and 
lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he 
rentured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound 
with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven 
individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence 
are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultiva- 
tion, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognize 
our precarious estate in life, and the first part of 
courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A 
frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too 
anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over 
the past, stamps the man who is well armored for this 
world. 

And not only well armored for himself, but a good 
friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to 
cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as 
panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcass, 
has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist 
who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted 



MS TRIPLEX 95 

wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for 
him in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So 
soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, 
like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a 
paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink 
spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlors with a regu- 
lated temperature, and takes his morality on the princi- 
ple of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one impor- 
tant body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the 
noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint 
into the parlor with the regulated temperature ; and the 
tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To 
be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends 
by standing stock-still. Now the man who has his heart 
on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a 
brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly 
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different 
acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going 
true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, 
if he be running toward anything better than wildfire, 
he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. 
Lord, look after his health ; Lord, have a care of his soul, 
says he; and he has at the key of the position, and 
swashes through incongruity and peril toward his aim. 
Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he 
is on all sides of all of us ; unfortunate surprises gird him 
round; mimmouthed friends and relations hold up their 
hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: 
and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of 
living, a fellow with something pushing and spontane- 
ous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any 
other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace 
until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster 
Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic man- 
ner. These are great incentives ; not for any of these. 



96 ^S TRIPLEX 

but for the plain satisfaction of livings of being about 
their business in some sort or other^ do the brave, serv- 
iceable men of every nation tread down the nettle 
danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks 
of prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think 
of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set 
him upon his dictionary, and carried him through tri- 
umphantly until the end ! Who, if he were wisely con- 
siderate of things at large, would ever embark upon any 
work much more considerable than a halfpenny post 
card? Who would project a serial novel, after Thack- 
eray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who 
would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied 
with the consideration of death? 

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all 
this is ! To forego all the issues of living in a parlor 
with the" regulated temperature — as if that were not to 
die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch ! 
As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and with- 
out even the sad immunities of death ! As if it were not 
to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own 
pitiable change ! The Permanent Possibility is pre- 
served, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, 
as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. 
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to 
waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done 
with it, than to die* daily in the sickroom. By all 
means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give 
you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make 
one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a 
week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we 
ought to honor useful labor. A spirit goes out of the 
man who means execution, which outlives the most un- 
timely ending. All who have meant good work with 
their whole hearts, have done good work, although they 



WALT WHITMAN 97 

may die before they have the time to sign it. Every 
heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a 
hopeful impulse behind it in the worid^ and bettered the 
tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, 
like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast 
projects, and planning monstrous foundations. Hushed 
with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, 
they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there 
not something brave and spirited in such a termination? 
and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming 
in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling 
to an end in sandy deltas } When the Greeks made their 
fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, 
I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also 
in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake 
the man, this is to die young. Death has not been 
suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. 
In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of 
being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The 
noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with 
him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded 
spirit shoots into the spiritual land. 



WALT WHITMAN 

(1878) 

Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a 
good deal bandied about in books and magazines. It 
has become familiar both in good and ill repute. His 
works have been largely bespattered with praise by 
his admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by ir- 
reverent enemies. Now, wlietlier his poetry is good or 



98 WALT WHITMAN 

bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit of a difference 
of opinion without alienating those who differ. We 
could not keep the peace with a man who should" put 
forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses 
in Samson Agonistes ; but, I think, we may shake hands 
with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's vol- 
ume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of 
incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not 
be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a 
work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot 
be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may even 
see passages of a high poetry here and there among its 
eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt Whitman 
is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his 
works is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I 
would not disinherit a son upon the question, nor even 
think much the worse of a critic, for I should always 
have an idea what he meant. 

What Whitman has to say is another affair from how 
he says it. It is not possible to acquit any one of defec- 
tive intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not inter- 
ested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it represents. 
Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a 
more exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious 
and prominent position. Whether he may greatly in- 
fluence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of 
the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard 
to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for 
instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works 
of Herbert Spencer; and yet where, in all the history 
books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous 
contemporaries } Mr. Spencer so decorous — I had al- 
most said, so dandy — in dissent; and Whitman, like a 
large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches 
of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an 



WALT WHITMAN 99 

echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer 
found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the 
other shores of the Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of 
Whitman ? 



Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to 
a system. He was a theorizer about society before he 
was a poet. He first perceived something wanting, and 
then sat down squarely to supply the want. The reader, 
running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as 
much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of 
poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be 
from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear 
to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although some- 
times he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. 
The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and precon- 
ceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, 
full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, 
if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the ten- 
dencies around him. He saw much good and evil on all 
sides, not yet settled down into some more or less unjust 
compromise as in older nations, but still in the act of 
settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would 
turn out; whether the compromise would be very just 
or very much the reverse, and give great or little scope 
for healthy human energies. From idle wonder to active 
speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been 
early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its 
extreme unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls 
"Feudal Literature" could liave little living action on 
the tumult of American democracy; what he calls the 
"Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of Wer- 
ther and Byron, could have no action for good in any 



100 WALT WHITMAN 

time or place. Both propositions^ if art had none but a 
direct moral influence, would be true enough; and as 
this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true enough 
for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which 
was to inhere in the life of the present; which was to 
be, first, human, and next, American; which was to be 
brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a 
popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, 
catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of himianity 
which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth 
and education, and suited, in one of his favorite phrases, 
to "the average man." To the formation of some such 
literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so 
many contributions, one sometimes explaining, some- 
times superceding, the other: and the whole together not 
so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints. 
He does not profess to have built the castle, but he pre- 
tends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has 
not made the poetry, but he flatters himself he has 
done something toward making the poets. 

His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and 
coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid 
down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet 
is to gather together for men, and set in order, the ma- 
terials of their existence. He is "The Answerer;" he 
is to find some way of speaking about life that shall 
satisfy, if only for the moment, man's enduring astonish- 
ment at his own position. And besides having an answer 
ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must 
shake people out of their indifference, and force them 
to make some election in this world, instead of sliding 
dully forward in a dream. Life is a business we are 
all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly from day 
to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our 
moments by the inanities of custom. We should de- 



1 



WALT WHITMAN 101 

spise a man who gave as little activity and forethought 
to the conduct of any other business. But in this^ which 
is the one thing of all others^ since it contains them 
all, we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief 
impression obliterates another. There is something 
stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant tilings. 
And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise 
to take an outlook beyond daily concerns, and compre- 
hend the narrow limits and great possibilities of our 
existence. It is the duty of the poet to induce such 
moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of 
all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt 
sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and 
imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and 
fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify his readers 
into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide 
and eager observation of the world, and make them 
direct their ways by a superior prudence, which has 
little or nothing in common with the maxims of the 
copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they 
would heartily disown after two hours' serious reflec- 
tion on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am 
sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted Ground 
of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to 
the Beulah of considerate virtue. But there they all 
slumber and take their rest in the middle of God's beau- 
tiful and wonderful universe ; the drowsy heads have 
nodded together in the same position since first their 
fathers fell asleep ; and not even the sound of the last 
trumpet can wake them to a single active thought. The 
poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows 
to a sense of their own and other people's principles in 
life. 

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but 
an indifferent means to such an end. Language is but 



102 WALT WHITMAN 

a poor bull's-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast 
cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once 
said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes 
us forget the absence of the many which remain unex- 
pressed; like a bright window in a distant view_, which 
dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings. 
There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to ex- 
press the merest fraction of a man's experience in an 
hour. The speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and 
the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten 
minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to 
shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout ap- 
proaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be 
as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter 
of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of 
thought when we put it into words; for the words are 
all colored and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring 
with them, from former uses, ideas of praise and blame 
that have nothing to do with the question in hand. So 
we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by the 
realities of life and not by the partial terms that repre- 
sent them in man's speech ; and at times of choice, we 
must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute 
convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, 
which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which 
are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words 
are for communication, not for judgment. This is what 
every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools 
and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into 
the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not 
learned in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a- 
piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring 
to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a new 
difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative 
poet; he must do more than waken up the sleepers to 



WALT WHITMAN 103 

his words; he must persuade them to look over the book 
and at life with their own eyes. 

This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is 
this that he means when he tells us that "To glance 
with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But 
he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on 
the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds 
by the presence of other men, of animals, or of inani- 
mate things. To glance with an eye, were it only at a 
chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive 
process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, 
than to read the works of all the logicians extant. If 
both, by a large allowance, may be said to end in cer- 
tainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the other 
to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they 
run away; if they only apprehend a deduction, they 
keep wandering around in an experimental humor. 
Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and not 
like books .'^ Is there no actual piece of nature that he 
can show the man to his face, as he might show him a 
tree if they were walking together? Yes, there is one: 
the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the poet is to speak 
efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's 
mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, 
he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. 
Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole 
religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, 
or postulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange 
excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but 
they cannot rule behavior. Our faith is not the highest 
truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been 
able to assimilate into the very texture and method of 
our thinking. It is not, therefore, by flashing before a 
man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by induc- 
tion, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him 



104 WALT WHITMAN 

on from one stage of reasoning to another, that the man 
will be effectually renewed. He cannot be made to be- 
lieve anything; but he can be made to see that he has 
always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It 
is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know !" and is, perhaps, 
half irritated to see how nearly the author has fore- 
stalled his own thoughts, that he is on the way to what 
is called in theology a Saving Faith. 

Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To 
give a certain unity of ideal to the average population 
of America — to gather their activities about some con- 
ception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if 
only for the moment — the poet must portray that popu- 
lation as it is. Like human law, human poetry is simply 
declaratory. If any ideal is possible, it must be already 
in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same reason, 
in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And 
hence Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual 
— he is complete in himself: the others are as good as 
he; only he sees it, and they do not." To show them 
how good they are, the poet must study his fellow- 
countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on 
the hunt for his book of travels. There is a sense, of 
course, in which all true books are books of travel; and 
all genuine poets must run their risk of being charged 
with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such 
books more surprising than to those whose own life is 
faithfully and smartly pictured? But this danger is all 
upon one side; and you may judiciously flatter the por- 
trait without any likelihood of the sitter's disowning it 
for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: 
that by drawing at first hand from himself and his 
neighbors, accepting without shame the inconsistencies 
and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating 
the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make 



WALT WHITMAN 105 

sure of belief^ and at the same time encourage people 
forward by the means of praise. 

II 

We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of 
puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. 
The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has 
rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugli- 
ness of life, and they record their unfitness at consider- 
able length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's com- 
plaint produces too many flimsy imitators ; for there is 
always something consolatory in grandeur, but the sym- 
phony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically 
sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this 
Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in 
many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. 
Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of 
private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful ex- 
perience on all the grown and hearty men who have 
dared to say a good word for life since the beginning 
of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy 
Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary 
wires. 

It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this 
be its result, among the comparatively innocent and 
cheerful ranks of men. When our little poets have to be 
sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we 
must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. 
Where a man in not the best of circumstances preserves 
composure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco, and 
his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and unre- 
munerative labor; where a man in this predicament can 
afford a lesson by the way to what are called his intel- 
lectual superiors, there is plainly something to be lost. 



106 WALT WHITMAN 

as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to 
think differently. It is better to leave him as he is than 
to teach him whining. It is better that he should go 
without the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt 
and paralyzing sentimentalism are to be the consequence. 
Let us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound sto- 
lidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs 
and decolorizes for poor natures the wonderful pageant 
of consciousness ; let us teach people, as much as we can, 
to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympa- 
thize; but let us see to it, above all, that we give these 
lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man up 
in courage while we demolish its substitute, indifference. 
Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the 
poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livable- 
ness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be "hymns 
of the praise of things." They are to make for a cer- 
tain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave 
delight fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no 
difficulty in introducing his optimism: it fitted readily 
enough with his system; for the average man is truly a 
courageous person and truly fond of living. One of 
Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, 
as he is there perfectly successful, and does precisely 
what he designs to do throughout: Takes ordinary and 
even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by 
a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something 
like beauty ; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end. 

"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, 
cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields," he says, "the 
love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, 
drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, — all 
is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, 
and of the residence of the poetic in outdoor people." 

There seems to me something truly original in this 



WALT WHITMAN 107 

choice of trite examples. You will remark how adroitly 
Whitman begins, hunters and woodmen being confessedly 
romantic. And one thing more. If he had said "the 
love of healthy men for the female form," he would 
have said almost a silliness ; for the thing has never been 
dissembled out of delicacy, and is so obvious as to be a 
public nuisance. But by reversing it, he tells us some- 
thing not unlike news; something that sounds quite 
freshly in words ; and, if the reader be a man, gives him 
a moment of great self-satisfaction and spiritual ag- 
grandizement. In many different authors you may find 
passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a 
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the 
point in our connection. The tenacity of many ordinary 
people in ordinary pursuits is a sort of standing chal- 
lenge to everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed 
in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and 
happy over something else. Not to be upsides in this 
with any groom or gardener, is to be very meanly or- 
ganized. A man should be ashamed to take his food if 
he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some 
of it into intense and enjoyable occupation. 

Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keep- 
ing up a sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His 
book, he tells us, should be read "among the cooling in- 
fluences of external nature;" and this recommendation, 
like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed 
to his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. 
Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating 
tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant 
exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and 
quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; 
we think in a plain, unf everish temper ; little things seem 
big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and 
the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the 



108 WALT WHITMAN 

spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks 
very ill of the atmosphere of parlors or libraries. Wis- 
dom keeps school outdoors. And he has the art to recom- 
mend this attitude of mind by simply pluming himself 
upon it as a virtue; so that the reader_, to keep the ad- 
vantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is 
tricked into professing the same view. And this spirit, 
as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm of his work. 
Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of 
expression, something trenchant and straightforward, 
something simple and surprising, distinguishes his 
poems. He has sayings that come home to one like the 
Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so 
many men who write better, with a sense of relief from 
strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one 
passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great 
city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled 
imaginative justice of language, "the huge and thought- 
ful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may 
be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its 
influence on the future, should be in the hands of all 
parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing 
malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness 
yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the 
youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry 
the universe upon his shoulders. 

Ill 

Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by 
familiarity. He considers it just as wonderful that 
there are myriads of stars, as that one man should rise 
from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of his 
hand just as curious as any special revelation." His 
whole life is to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, 



WALT WHITMAN 109 

one perpetual miracle. Everything is strange, ever}-- 
thing unaccountable, everything beautiful; from a bug 
to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite 
for food. He makes it his business to see things as if 
he saw them for the first time, and professes astonish- 
ment on principle. But he has no leaning toward my- 
thology; avows his contempt for what he calls "unregen- 
erate poetry;" and does not mean by nature 

"The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and 
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its 
geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls 
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing 
billions of tons." 

Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of ideal- 
ist all impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love 
and faith, astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon 
equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is not 
against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He 
wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more com- 
prehensive synthesis, than any or than all of them put 
together. In feeling after the central type of man, he 
must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must sub- 
sume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth 
to them; his statement of facts must include all religion 
and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. 
The world as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, 
and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with 
its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set 
forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, 
for the understanding of the average man. One of his 
favorite endeavors is to get the whole matter into a nut- 
shell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one 
after another, about his reader's ears ; to hurry him, in 
breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and for- 
ward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own 



no WALT WHITMAN 

momentary personality; and then^ drawing the ground 
from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, 
to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with 
enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceiva- 
ble numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heav- 
enly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us 
some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley 
has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words : 
The desire of the moth for the star. 

The same truth, but to what a different purpose ! 
Whitman's moth is mightily at his ease about all the 
planets in heaven, and cannot think too highly of our 
sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that imagi- 
nation flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the 
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and 
habitable corner. "The earth, that is sufficient; I do 
not want the constellations any nearer," he remarks. 
And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed," 
says he, "before a million universes." It is the language 
of a transcendental common-sense, such as Thoreau held 
and sometimes uttered. But Whitman, who has a some- 
what vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon 
of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints ; 
he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate 
the songs of Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human 
metaphysic. He tells his disciples that they must be 
ready "to confront the growing arrogance of Realism." 
Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occa- 
sion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he 
says, */is greater to one than oneself is;" a statement 
with an irreligious smack at the first sight ; but, like most 
startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He 
will give effect to his own character without apology; 
he sees "that the elementary laws never apologize." "I 
reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I 



WALT WHITMAN 111 

reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my 
house by, after all." The level follows the law of its 
being; so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every per- 
son, is good in his own place and way ; God is the maker 
of all, and all are in one design. For he believes in God, 
and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No ar- 
ray of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how 
much at peace I am about God and about death." There 
certainly never was a prophet who carried things with 
a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than 
a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and lan- 
guage, you will observe, positively fails him to express 
how far he stands above the highest human doubts and 
trepidations. 

But next in order of truths to a person's sublime con- 
viction of himself, comes the attraction of one person 
for another, and all that we mean by the word love: 

"The dear love of man for his comrade — the attraction of friend 
for friend, 
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, 
Of city for city and land for land." 

The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken 
in upon by other people's faces; he sees a look in their 
eyes that corresponds to something in his own heart; 
there comes a tone in their voices which convicts him of 
a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he 
is hymning the ego and commercing with God and the 
universe, a woman goes below his window; and at the 
turn of her skirt or the color of her eyes, Icarus is re- 
called from heaven by the run. Love is so startlingly 
real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality 
with the consciousness of personal existence. We are 
as heartily persuaded of the identity of those we love 
as of our own identity. And so sympathy pairs with 
self'-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth; 



112 WALT WHITMAN 

and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, 
and self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be 
bounded and his strength perfected by the most intimate, 
eager, and long-suffering love for others. To some ex- 
tent this is taking away with the left hand what has 
been so generously given with the right. Morality has 
been ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be 
brought in again by the window. We are told, on one 
page, to do as we please ; and on the next we are sharply 
upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. 
We are first assured that we are the finest fellows in the 
world in our own right; and then it appears that we are 
only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic 
code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in clear 
ether a moment before is plunged down again among 
the fogs and complications of duty. And this is all the 
more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only 
on love between sex and sex, and between friends of the 
same sex, but in the field of the less intense political 
sympathies ; and his ideal man must not only be a gen- 
erous friend but a conscientious voter into the bargain. 
His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is 
not, the reader will remember, to tell us how good we 
ought to be, but to remind us how good we are. He 
is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving 
that we are free and kind already. He passes our 
corporate life under review, to show that it is up- 
held by the very virtues of which he makes himself the 
advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says some 
where in his big, plain way, "there is no object so sof 
but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe." Rightly] 
understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the sym 
pathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and 
securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of 
course, for doubt or discussion, about conduct, where 



] 



WALT WHITMAN 113 

every one is to follow the law of his being with exact 
compliance. Whitman hates doubt^ deprecates discus- 
sion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping 
sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to 
use one of his absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfac- 
tion and aplomb of animals." If he preaches a sort of 
ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the 
ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he de- 
clares it to be the original deliverance of the human 
heart; or at least, for he would be honestly historical in 
method, of the human heart as at present Christianized. 
His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is 
one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born 
hero to come up to Whitman's standard in the practice 
of any of the positive virtues; but of a negative virtue, 
such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to say, 
that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word 
or two upon the other side. He would lay down nothing 
that would be a clog; he would prescribe nothing that 
cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The great point is 
to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite 
this would be justified by the belief that God made all, 
and that all was good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has 
only to cry "Tally-ho," and mankind will break into a 
gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to another 
class of minds, it may look like the result of the some- 
what cynical reflection that you will not make a kind 
man out. of one who is unkind by any precepts under 
heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural circum- 
stances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it 
would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel 
more warmly and act more courageously, the balance of 
results will be for good. 

So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as 
a doctrine; as a picture of man's life it is incomplete 



114 WALT WHITMAN 

and misleading^ although eminently cheerful. This he 
is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is pro- 
phetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consist- 
ency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; 
and then pat comes the answer, the best answer ever 
given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a woman: 
"Very well, then, I contradict myself !" with this addi- 
tion, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so 
satisfactory: "I am large — I contain multitudes." Life, 
as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of 
tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if 
it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel 
according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard 
the existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the 
fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; 
and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of 
his^ optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be 
helpful. He expresses a conviction, indeed, that all 
will be made up to the victims in the end; that "what 
is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even 
"the old man who has lived without purpose and feels 
it with bitterness worse than gall." But this is not to 
palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the 
present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst 
things that ever was supposed to come from America, 
consoled himself with the reflection that it was the 
price we have to pay for cochineal. And with that mur- 
derous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the 
best of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, 
and have been no more heard of in the mouths of reason- 
able men. Whitman spares us all allusions to the ■ 
cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost 
as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed 
the sight of the enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. 
There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious to 



WALT WHITMAN 115 

be done. I do not know many better things in literature 
than the brief pictures — brief and vivid like things seen 
by lightning — with which he tries to stir up the world's 
heart upon the side of mercy. He braces us, on the one 
hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness ; on 
the other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people 
needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at 
a brave story; to inflame us with just resentment over 
the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when 
he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, 
all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a 
spirit which I can only call one of ultra-Christianity; 
and however wild, however contradictory, it may be in 
parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may 
be said of the Christian Gospels, that no one will read 
it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his 
conscience ; no one, however fallen, but he finds a kindly 
and supporting welcome. 

IV 

Nor has he been content with merely blowing the 
trumpet for the battle of well-doing; he has given to 
his precepts the authority of his own brave example. 
Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no 
sense of humor, he has succeeded as well in life as in 
his printed performances. The spirit that was in him 
has come forth most eloquently in his actions. Many 
who have only read his poetry have been tempted to 
set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but 
I never met any one who had known him personally 
who did not profess a solid affection and respect for 
the man's character. He practises as he professes ; 
he feels deeply that Christian love for all men, that 
toleration, that cheerful delight in serving others, which 



116 WALT WHITMAN 

he often celebrates in literature with a doubtful meas- 
ure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, 
the best and the most human and convincing passages are 
to be found in "these soil'd and creas'd little livraisons, 
each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small 
to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin," which 
he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the 
wounded or in the excitement of great events. They 
are hardly literature in the formal meaning of the 
word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he 
made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a 
dying soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a 
letter — short, straightforward to the point with none of 
the trappings of composition; but they breathe a pro- 
found sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of 
the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a 
man whom it is an honor to love. 

Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief 
in the future of These States (as, with reverential capi- 
tals, he loves to call them), made the war a period of 
great trial to his soul. The new virtue. Unionism, of 
which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into 
premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or 
hated, hung in the balance. And the game of war was 
not only momentous to him in its issues ; it sublimated 
his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured him in- 
timately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a the- 
atre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of 
religious revival. He watched Lincoln going daily to 
his work; he studied and fraternized with young sol- 
diery passing to the front; above all, he walked the 
hospitals, reading the Bible, distributing clean clothes, 
or apples, or tobacco; a patient, helpful, reverend man, 
full of kind speeches. 

His memoranda of this period are almost bewilder- 



WALT WHITMAN 117 

ing to read. From one point of view they seem those of 
a district visitor; from another, they look lil^e the form- 
less jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More than 
one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately 
claimed the writer for a fellow-woman. More than one 
literary purist might identify him as a shoddy newspaper 
correspondent without the necessary faculty of style. 
And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the 
weeping order of mankind, you will certainly find your 
eyes fill with tears, of which you have no reason to be 
ashamed. There is only one way to characterize a 
work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a 
passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, 
whose son died in hospital: 

"Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical 
treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. 
He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself 
liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in after- 
noons and sitting by him, and he liked to have me — liked to 
put out his arm and lay his hand on my knee — would keep it 
so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and 
flighty at night — often fancied himself with his regiment — by 
his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt by being 
blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent 
of — said T never in my life was thought capable of such a 
thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself 
talking as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I 
suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a 
long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single 
bad word, or thought, or idea escaped him. It was remark'd 
that many a man's conversation in his senses was not half so 
good as Frank's delirium. 

"He was perfectly willing to die — he had become very weak, 
and had suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor 
boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have 
been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the 
most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among 
strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, 
and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed. And 
now, like many other noble and good men, after serving his 
country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the 
very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy — ^yet there 



118 WALT WHITMAN 

is a text, 'God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after 
due time, appears to the soul. 

"I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, 
about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might 
be worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw 
him immediately to lose him." 

It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of 
this letter, but what are we to say of its profound good- 
ness and tenderness.^ It is written as though he had 
the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing 
in the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to 
say of its sober truthfulness, not exaggerating, not run- 
ning to phrases, not seeking to make a hero out of what 
was only an ordinary but good and brave young man? 
Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold; and 
this reticence is not literary, but humane; it is not that 
of a good artist but that of a good man. He knew that 
what the mother wished to hear about was Frank; and 
he told her about her Frank as he was. 



Something should be said of Whitman's style, for 
style is of the essence of thinking. And where a man 
is so critically deliberate as our author, and goes sol- 
emnl}^ about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indi- 
cation is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, un- 
rhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine 
processional movement; often so rugged and careless 
that it can only be described by saying that he has 
not taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself 
that it was selected principally because it was easy to 
write, although not without recollections of the marching 
measures of some of the prose in our English Old Testa- 
ment. According to Whitman, on the other hand, "the 
time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers 



WALT WHITMAN 119 

of form between Prose and Poetry . . . for the most 
cogent purposes of those great inland states, and for 
Texas and California, and Oregon;" — a statement which 
is among the happiest achievements of American humor. 
He calls his verses "recitatives/' in easily followed al- 
lusion to a musical form. "Easily written, loose-fingered 
chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum of your climax 
and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can 
perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, 
a great part of his work considered as verse is poor 
bald stuff. Considered, not as verse, but as speech, 
a great part of it is full of strange and admirable 
merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold 
and trenchant, is thrust into its place. Whitman has 
small regard to literary decencies, and is totally free 
from literary timidities. He is neither afraid of being 
slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being 
ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound 
of plain grandeur, sentimental affectation, and down- 
right nonsense. It would be useless to follow his de- 
tractors and give instances of how bad he can be at 
his worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to 
give extracted specimens of how happily he can write 
when he is at his best. These come in to most advantage 
in their own place; owing something, it may be, to the 
offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is 
certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excel- 
lences until he has grown accustomed to his faults. 
Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages 
almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's 
translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your 
ears perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will 
be no more to you than a particularly flagrant production 
by the Poet Close. 

A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, un- 



120 WALT WHITMAN 

fortunate in taking for thesis the beauty of the world 
as it now is, not only on the hill-tops, but in the factory ; 
not only by the harbor full of stately ships, but in the 
magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show 
beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. 
It is not to be done by the wishing. It is easy to posit 
as a theory, but to bring it home to men's minds is the 
problem of literature, and is only accomplished by rare 
talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid 
the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in 
one's right hand by way of pistol; to cover reams of 
paper in a galloping, headstrong vein; to cry louder 
and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no 
distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incompar- 
able matters ; to prove one's entire want of sympathy 
for the jaded, literary palate, by calling, not a spade 
a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical apostrophe; — 
this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way 
to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding 
to a respectable branch of industry, but the word "hat- 
ter" cannot be used seriously in emotional verse; not to 
understand this, is to have no literary tact; and I would, 
for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible 
expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. 
The book teams with similar comicalities; and, to a 
reader who is determined to take it from that side only, 
presents a perfect carnival of fun. 

A good deal of this is the result of theory playing 
its usual vile trick upon the artist. It is because he is 
a Democrat that Whitman must have in the hatter. If 
you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not 
say Hatter.'' One man is as good as another, and it 
is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in 
the life of the one as well as the other. A most incon- 
trovertible sentiment surely, and one which nobody 



WALT WHITMAN 121 

would think of controverting, wiiere — and here is the 
point — where any beauty has been shown. But how, 
where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply 
introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men 
have miscalled him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhap- 
sody? And what are we to say, where a man of 
Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a 
bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up 
the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, 
in an inventory of trades or implements, with no 
more color of coherence than so many index-words 
out of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say 
anything, but that it is a prodigiously amusing exhibi- 
tion for a line or so. The worst of it is, that Whit- 
man must have known better. The man is a great 
critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good one; and 
how much criticism does it require to know that capitula- 
tion is not description, or that fingering on a dumb key- 
board, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is 
not at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish 
I could believe he was quite honest with us ; but, indeed, 
who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a 
purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human 
magnanimity. 

One other point, where his means failed him, must 
be touched upon, however shortly. In his desire to 
accept all facts loyally and simply, it fell within his 
programme to speak at some length and with some 
plainness on what is, for I really do not know what 
reason, the most delicate of subjects. Seeing in that 
one of the most serious and interesting parts of life, 
he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as 
ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity 
with his tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a 
bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood beside the 
sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among 



122 WALT WHITMAN 

the things that can be spoken of without either a blush 
or a wink. But the Philistines have been too strong; 
and, to say truth. Whitman has rather played the fool. 
We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is improv- 
ing; that it would be a good thing if a window were 
opened on these close privacies of life ; that o'n this sub- 
ject, as on all others, he now and then lets fall a preg- 
nant saying. But we are not satisfied. We feel that 
he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He 
loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attract- 
ing too much of our attention in that of a Bull in a 
China Shop. And where, by a little more art, we 
might have been solemnized ourselves, it is too often 
Whitman alone who is solemn in the face of an audience 
somewhat indecorouslv amused. 



VI 

Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings 
in our disputable state, what is that higher prudence 
which was to be the aim and issue of these deliberate 
productions ? 

Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. 
If he could have adequately said his say in a single 
proverb, it is to be presumed he would not have put 
himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It 
was his programme to state as much as he could of the 
world with all its contradictions, and leave the upshot 
with God who planned it. What he has made of the 
world and the world's meanings is to be found at large 
in his poems. These altogether give his answers to the 
problems of belief and conduct; in many ways righteous 
and high-spirited, in some ways loose and contradictory. 
And yet there are two passages from the preface to 
the Leaves of Grass which do pretty well condense his 



WALT WHITMAN 123 

teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a 
measure of his spirit. 

"This is what you shall do/' he says in the one, "love the 
earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every 
one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your 
income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning 
God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off 
your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or 
number of men; go freely with powerful uneducated persons, 
and with the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves 
(his own works) in the open air every season of every year of 
your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or church, 
or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul." 

"The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other — 
and the greatest poet is, of course, himself — "knows that the 
young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, has 
done exceeding w^ell for himself; while the man who has not 
perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease 
has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning; 
and that only that person has no great prudence to learn, who 
has learned to prefer real long-lived things, and favors body 
and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely following 
the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and 
waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any emer- 
gency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death." 

There is much that is Christian in these extracts, 
startlingly Christian. Any reader who bears in mind 
Whitman's own advice and "dismisses whatever insults 
his own soul" will find plenty that is bracing, brighten- 
ing, and chastening to reward him for a little patience 
at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should 
get evil from so healtliy a book as the Leaves of Grass, 
which is simply comical where it falls short of nobility; 
but if there be any such, who cannot both take and leave, 
who cannot let a single opportunity pass by without 
some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as 
great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommend- 
ing the works of Whitman as in lending them Shake- 
speare, or letting them go abroad outside of the grounds 
of a private asylum. 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

(1878) 

"You know my mother now and then argues very notably; 
always very warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; 
and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we very 
seldom are so happy as to convince one another. A pretty com- 
mon case, I believe, in all vehement debatings. She says, I am 
too witty; Anglic^, too pert; I, that she is too wise; that is to 
say, being likewise put into English, not so young as she has 
heen.^'' — Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, Clarissa, vol. ii. Letter xiii. 

There is a strong feeling in favor of cowardly and 
prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while 
he is full of ardor and hope are to be received, it is 
supposed, with some qualification. But when the same 
person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up 
his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most 
of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of medi- 
ocre people, to discourage them from ambitious at- 
tempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. 
And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of human- 
ity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not 
follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true 
than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, 
and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett 
the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, 
while the other is still in his counting-house counting 
out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. 
But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnani- 
mous sayings common to high races and natures, which 
set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim 
it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is 
difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such say- 

124 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 125 

ings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every 
lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget 
your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher 
and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to 
the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and 
inflexible in money matters^ you fulfil the whole duty 
of man. 

It is a still more difficult consideration for our average 
men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down 
to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have 
inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and re- 
spectability, those characters in history who have most 
notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are 
spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honored 
with public monuments in the streets of our commercial 
centres. This is very bewildering to the* moral sense. 
You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest 
and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, 
to go a-colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, 
against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy 
example for one's daughters ! And then you have 
Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when 
all is said, was a most imprudent navigator. His life 
is not the* kind of thing one would like to put into the 
hands of young people; rather, one would do one's ut- 
most to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of 
adventure and disintegrating influence in life. The 
time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names 
in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and 
even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity 
is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the 
mediocrities a very peculiar attitude toward the nobler 
and showier sides of national life. They will read of 
the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as 
they assist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. Per- 



126 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

sons of substance take in the Times and sit composedly 
in pit or boxes according to the degree of their pros- 
perity in business. As for the generals who go gallop- 
ing up and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked 
hats — as for the actors who raddle their faces and de- 
mean themselves for hire upon the stage — they must 
belong, thank God ! to a different order of beings, whom 
we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, 
bottomless inane, or read about like characters in an- 
cient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would 
no more think of copying their behavior, let us hope, 
than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves 
blue in consequence of certain admissions in the first 
chapter of their school history of England. 

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly 
proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another in- 
stance of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men 
about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of 
allowances are made for the illusions of youth ; and 
none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age. 
It is held to be a good taunt, and somehow or other 
to clinch the question logically, when an old gentle- 
man waggles his head and says : "Ah, so I thought when 
I was your age." It is not thought an answer at all, 
if the young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall 
most probably think when I am yours." And yet the 
one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, 
a Roland for an Oliver. 

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowl- 
edge in the making,*' All opinions, properly so called, 
are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that 
a man will travel any further; but if he has really con- 
sidered the world and drawn a conclusion, lie has 
travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got 
by rote, which are stages on the road to nowhere but 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 127 

second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword 
in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an 
opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made 
one for yourself. There are too many of these catch- 
words in the world for people to rap out upon you like 
an oath and by way of an argument. They have a 
currency as intellectual counters ; and many respectable 
persons pay their way with nothing else. They seem 
to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. 
The imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown argu- 
ments is supposed to reside in them, just as some of 
the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the con- 
stable's truncheon. They are used in pure sujiersti- 
tion, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exor- 
cism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking 
unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths of 
babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes 
to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the examina- 
tion of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing 
and fortifying to the mind. 

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of 
having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They 
were very good places to pass through, and I am none 
the less at my destination. All my old opinions were 
only stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself 
is only a stage on the way to something else. I am no 
more abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist with 
a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking 
infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a million 
ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to con- 
vince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must 
do something, be something, believe something. It is 
not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate 
balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead 
of coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would 



128 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

be verf apt to remain in a state of balance and blank 
to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a 
dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of 
in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zeal- 
ous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. 
For my part, I look back to the time when I was a 
Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced 
myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these 
great changes to what we call great blind forces; their 
jjlindness being so much more perspicacious than the 
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see 
that my own scheme would not answer; and all the 
other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress 
some elements of goodness just as much as they en- 
couraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Con- 
servative with years, I am going through the normal 
cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of 
men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit 
to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age 
or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge 
that it is necessarily a change for the better — I dare 
say it is deplorably for the worse. I have no choice in 
the business, and can no more resist this tendency of 
my mind than I could prevent my body from beginning 
to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase 
runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome de- 
sires ; but I am in no hurry about that ; nor, when the 
time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just 
in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on hav- 
ing outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. 
Old people have faults of their own; they tend to be- 
come cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether 
from the growth of experience or the decline of animal 
heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other 
faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 129 

sense I hope I am journeying toward the truth, in 
another I am indubitably posting toward these forms 
and sources of error. 
.^■'^-iis we go catching and catching at this or that cor- 
ner of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous 
possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of 'prudence, 
we may compare the headlong course of our years to a 
swift torrent in which a man is carried away ; now he 
is dashed against a boulder, now he grapples for a 
moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled 
out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. 
We have no more than glimpses and touches; we are 
torn away from our theories ; we are spun round and 
round and shown this or the other view of life, until only 
fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a 
sight at a condition in life, and say we have studied 
it; our most elaborate view is no more than an impres- 
sion. If we had breathing space, we should take the 
occasion to modify and adjust; but at this break-neck 
hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no 
sooner in love than married or jilted, no sooner one 
age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in the 
fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline toward 
the grave. It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect 
clear and stable views in a medium so perturbed and 
fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which things are 
tested to a scruple; we theorize with a pistol to our 
head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on 
which we have not only to pass a judgment, but to take 
action, before the hour is at an end. And we cannot 
even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of 
things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; 
and not infrequently we find our own disguise the 
strangest in the masquerade. In the course of time, we 
grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved. 



130 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ains- 
worth so amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, 
and not nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use 
pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek 
has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modi- 
fied or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if 
our views do not modify and change in a proportion. To 
hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to 
have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, 
not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well 
birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain 
should sail to India from the port of London; and hav- 
ing brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first 
setting out, should obstinately use no other for the 
whole voyage. 

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin 
at Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. Si Jeunesse 
savait, si Vieillesse pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment, 
but not necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it is 
not so much that the young people do not know, as that 
they do not choose. There is something irreverent in 
the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has 
more to do with the wise resolutions of age than we 
are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive 
experiment to make an old man young again and leave 
him all his savoir. I scarcely think he would put his 
money in the Savings Bank after all ; I doubt if he would 
be s.uch an admirable son as we are led to expect ; and as 
for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out- 
Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers 
to the blush. Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before 
whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air 
of a high priest, and after whom dances many a suc- 
cessful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not 
a deity to cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any con- 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 131 

siderable age, it cannot be denied that he laments his 
imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth 
a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation. 
It is customary to say that age should be considered, 
because it comes last. It seems just as much to tlie 
point, that youth comes first. And the scale fairly 
kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a 
majority of cases, never comes at all. Disease and 
accident make short work of even the most prosperous 
persons ; death costs nothing, and the expense of a head- 
stone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To 
be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious 
schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has 
been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, 
and saving up everything for the festival that was never 
to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy 
which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead 
—and he has cunningly overreached himself: a combina- 
tion of calamities none the less absurd for being grim. 
To husband a favorite claret until the batch turns sour, 
is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much 
more with a whole cellar — a whole bodily existence ! 
People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in 
the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that 
is a different affair from giving up youth with all its 
admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of 
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than 
improbable, old age. We should not compliment a 
hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and 
reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew 
whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there 
be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely 
have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great 
and perilous waters ; and to take a cue from the dolorous 
old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaidens singing, 



132 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

and know that we shall never see dry land any more. 
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there 
is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass 
it round, and let us have a pipe before we go ! 

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous 
preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away. 
We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes 
to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, 
the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we 
grow old, a sort of equable j.og-trot of feeling is substi- 
tuted for the violent ups and downs of passion and dis- 
gust; the same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets 
our apprehensions ; if the pleasures are less intense, the 
troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, 
this period for which we are asked to hoard up every- 
thing as for a time of famine, is, in its own right, the 
richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by manag- 
ing its own work and following its own happy inspira- 
tion, youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure 
of age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a 
self-contained and independent age; and the muff in- 
evitably develops into the bore. There are not many 
Dr. Johnsons, to set forth upon their first romantic 
voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc 
or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go down in 
a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it 
while we are still young. It will not do to delay until 
we are clogged with prudence and limping with rheuma- 
tism, and people begin to ask us "What does Gravity 
out of bed.^" Youth is the time to go flashing from one 
end of the world to the other both in mind and body ; to 
try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes 
at midnight ; to see sunrise in town and country ; to be 
converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the meta- 
physics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire. 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 133 

and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Her- 
nani. There is some meaning in the old theory about 
wild oats ; and a man who has not had his green-sickness 
and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended 
on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," 
says Lord Beacons field, one of the brightest and best 
preserved of youths up to the date of his last novel,* "it 
is extraordinary how hourly and how violently change 
the feelings of an inexperienced young man." And this 
mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort 
of indestructible virginity; a magic armor, with which 
he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come 
unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voy- 
age, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; 
his soul has as many lives as a cat, he will live in all 
weathers, and never be a half-penny the worse. Those 
who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair 
chance, were probably little worth saving from the first ; 
they must have been feeble fellows — creatures made 
of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger 
or true joy fulness, in their composition; we may sym- 
pathize with their parents, but there is not much cause 
to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite 
honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind. 

When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, 
so I thought when I was your age," he has proved the 
youth's case. Doubtless, whether from growth of ex- 
perience or decline of animal heat, he tliinks so no 
longer; but he thought so while he was young; and all 
men have thought so while they were young, since there 
was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here 
is another young man adding his vote to those of pre- 
vious generations and riveting another link to the chain 
of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young 

* Lothair. 



134. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops 
and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild 
thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, 
or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for 
something worthier than their lives. 

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel 
more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me 
recommend the following little tale. A child who had 
been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of 
lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of ac- 
knowledged boyhood without any abatement of this 
childish taste. He was thirteen; already he had been 
taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he 
had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; 
the shades of the prison-house were closing about him 
with a vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than 
to put the thoughts of children into the language of their 
elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this 
juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my play- 
things, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position 
to secure myself against idle jeers. At the same time, 
I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all 
people give them up out of the same pusillanimous re- 
spect for those who are a little older; and if they do 
not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because 
they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I shall 
conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; 
but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire 
and shut myself up among my playthings until the day 
I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the 
Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he re- 
marked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle 
of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy 
Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! 
The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not un- 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 135 

worthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has prob- 
ably anticipated, it, is never likely to be carried into 
effect. There was a worm in the bud, a fatal error 
in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then 
youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom 
is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good 
grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings 
well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable 
youth, and to settle, when the time arrives, into a green 
and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and de- 
serve well of yourself and your neighbor. 

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. 
The}^ rnay have been over the score on one side, just as 
those of age are probably over the score on the other. 
But they had a point; they not only befitted your age 
and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had 
a relation to what was outside of you, and implied 
criticisms on the existing state of things, which you 
need not allow to have been undeserved, because you 
now see that they were partial. All error, not merely 
verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth 
is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in 
sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing ques- 
tions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial 
acts indicate the defects of our society. When the tor- 
rent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect 
him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the 
scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the 
Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in 
universal atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the in- 
justices of society, see nothing for it but the abolish- 
ment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. 
Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow 
revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be 
dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a 



136 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 

theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and 
incongruities of life and take everything as it comes 
in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the uni- 
verse like a pill; they travel on through the world like 
smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake 
give me the young man who "has brains enough to make 
a fool of himself ! As for the others, the irony of facts 
shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them 
in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall 
be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and 
such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those 
who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not 
learned the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. 
If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own 
natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympa- 
thetic against some nobler career in the future, we had 
all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have 
the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings 
would be but to make a parody of an angel. 

In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, 
there is a strong probability that age is not much more 
so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with 
infallible credulity. A man finSs he has been wrong 
at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce 
the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely 
right. Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still 
upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. 
Since we have explored the maze so long without re- 
sult, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot 
have to explore much longer; close by must be the 
centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of orna- 
mental water. How if there were no centre at all, but 
just one alley after another, and the whole world a 
labyrinth without end or issue? 

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation. 



CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 137 

which I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I ad- 
vance is true/' said one. "But not the whole truth/' 
answered the other. "Sir/' returned the first (and it 
seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the 
speech)^ "Sir^ there is no such thing as the whole truth !" 
Indeed, there is nothing sd evident in life as that there 
are two sides to a question. History is one long illus- 
tration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, 
in cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We 
never pause for a moment's consideration, but we admit 
it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity exactly 
by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into 
our ears that this or that question has only one possible 
solution ; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, domi- 
nates things for awhile and shakes the world out of a 
doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and 
uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the 
other side and demolish the generous imposture. While 
Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his Insti- 
tutes, and hot-headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, 
Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his 
library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find 
as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found 
already in the Church. Age may have one side, but 
assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more 
certain than that both are right, except perhaps that 
both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who 
knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form 
of agreement rather than a form of difference? 

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for 
a bit of a philosopher must contradict himself to his 
very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into 
thinking that we have the whole thing before us at 
last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that 
there are as many as you please; that there is no centre 



138 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre 
is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every 
ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed 
song of pure content" to which we are ever likely to 
lend our musical voices. 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS 
CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 

(1880) 

I 

Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a 
bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of 
his mind and character. With his almost acid sharp- 
ness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, 
there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of 
the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not 
urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smil- 
ing, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; 
he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, 
but was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He 
was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never 
married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he 
never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he 
ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use 
of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither 
trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he pre- 
ferred,, he answered, 'the nearest.' " So many negative 
superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From 
his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the 
humorous passages, under the impression that they were 
beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 139 

see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much 
easier/' says Emerson acutely ;, much easier for Thoreau 
to say no than yes; and that is a characteristic which 
depicts the man. It is a useful accomplishment to be 
able to say no, but surely it is the essence of amiability 
to prefer to say yes where it is possible. There is 
something wanting in the man who does not hate him- 
self whenever he is constrained to say no. And there 
was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter. He 
was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had 
not enough of them to be* truly polar with humanity; 
whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was 
at least not altogether one of us, for he was not touched 
with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes 
have room for all positive qualities, even those which 
are disreputable, in the capacious theatre of their dis- 
positions. Such can live many lives; while a Thoreau 
can live but one, and that only with perpetual foresight. 
He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler 
sort; and he had this one great merit, that he succeeded 
so far as to be happy. "I love my fate to the core and 
rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay dying, here 
is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too 
feeble to control the pen) : "You ask particularly after 
my health. I suppose that I have not many months to 
live, but of course know nothing about it. I may say 
that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and re- 
gret nothing.'* It is not given to all to bear so clear 
a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any 
without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself 
is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and last- 
ing happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only 
from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstacy in liv- 
ing was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered 
and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt 



140 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, 
in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, 
and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one 
word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue 
to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a 
corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake 
of certain virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that 
his tastes were noble; that his ruling passion was to 
keep himself unspotted from the world; and that his 
luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs 
and early rising. But a man may be both coldly 
cruel in the pursuit of goodness, and morbid even in the 
pursuit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the pas- 
sage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and 
coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It 
it this: He thought it bad economy and worthy of no 
true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the morning 
with such muddy stimulants ; let him but see the sun rise, 
and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the labors 
of the day. That may be reason good enough to ab- 
stain from tea ; but when we go on to find the same man, 
on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly 
everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasur- 
ably use, and from the rubs and trials of human so- 
ciety itself into the bargain, we recognize that valetudi- 
narian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness 
itself. We need have no respect for a state of artificial 
training. True health is to be able to do without it. 
Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon 
a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as 
much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in 
vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself 
from his neighbors' habits in order to be happy, is in 
much the same case with one who requires to take opium 
for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who 



I 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 141 

can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still 
preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence. 

Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral 
shyness; for they were all delicacies. He could guide 
himself about the woods on the darkest night by the 
touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an 
exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with 
accuracy, and gauge cubic contents by the eye. His 
smell was so dainty that he could perceive the foetor of 
dwelling houses as he passed them by at night; his pal- 
ate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the 
taste of wine — or perhaps, living in America, had never 
tasted any that was good; and his knowledge of nature 
was so complete and curious that he could have told 
the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of 
the plants. In his dealings with animals, he was the 
original of Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the 
woodchuck out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox 
came to him for protection; wild squirrels have been 
seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his 
arm into a pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, 
lying undismayed in the palm of his hand. There were 
few things that he could not do. He could make a house, 
a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar, 
a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, 
swim, and manage a boat. The smallest occasion served 
to display his physical accomplishment; and a manu- 
facturer, from merely observing his dexterity with the 
window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on 
the spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, 
"is the ability to do some slight thing better." But 
such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in 
every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be 
changed in his case, for lie could do most things with 
unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approving 



142 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

eye to himself when he wrote: "Though the youth at last 
grows indijfferent, the laws of the universe are not indif- 
ferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensi- 
tive/' 



II 

Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very 
first to lead a life of self-improvement: the needle did 
not tremble as with richer natures, but pointed steadily 
north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one, he 
turned all this strength in that direction. He was met 
upon the threshold by a common difficulty. In this 
world, in spite of its many agreeable features, even 
the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live. 
It is not possible to devote your time to study and 
meditation without what are quaintly but happily de- 
nominated private means; these absent, a man must 
contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public 
such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau 
loved to put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was 
to Thoreau even a sourer necessity than it is to most; 
there was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man, 
in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the 
yoke of custom ; and he was so eager to cultivate himself 
and to be happy in his own society, that he could con- 
sent with difficulty even to the interruptions of friend- 
ship. "Such are my engagements to myself that I 
dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invita- 
tion ; and the italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found 
time to study virtue, and between whiles to conduct the 
imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is so busy im- 
proving himself, that he must think twice about a morn- 
ing call. And now imagine him condemned for eight 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 143 

hours a day to some uncongenial and unmeaning busi- 
ness ! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical 
in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous 
and swimmingly progressive. Thus he learned to make 
lead pencils, and, when he had gained the best certificate 
and his friends began to congratulate him on his estab- 
lishment in life, calmly announced that he should never 
make another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not 
do again what I have done once." For when a* thing has 
once been done as well as it wants to be, it is of no fur- 
ther interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, 
and when it became needful to support his family, he re- 
turned patiently to this mechanical art — a step more 
than worthy of himself. 

The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experi- 
ment in the service of Admetus; but others followed. 
"I have thoroughly tried school-keeping," he writes, 
"and found that my expenses were in proportion, or 
rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was 
obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, 
accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As 
I did not teach for the benefit of my fellow-men, but 
simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have 
tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years 
to get under way in that, and that then I should proba- 
bly be on my way to the devil." Nothing, indeed, can 
surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon that 
subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole 
enterprise of this nation is not illustrated by a thought," 
he writes; "it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is 
nothing in it for which a man should lay down his life, 
nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did 
not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in 
the old laws of this world would be staggered. The 
statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such busi- 



144. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

ness surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact 
that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably 
father to the figures ; but there is something enlivening 
in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican re- 
venge, and sneering like Voltaire. 

Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus dis- 
carded one after another, Thoreau, with a stroke of 
strategy, turned the position. He saw his way to get 
his board and lodging for practically nothing; and Ad- 
metus never got less work out of any servant since the 
world began. It was his ambition to be an oriental 
philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort of 
oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood 
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may 
call it, he displayed a' vast amount of truly down-East 
calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of busi- 
ness. Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which, 
I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths and 
are only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed^ 
something essentially youthful distinguishes all Thor- 
eau's knockdown blows at current opinion. Like the 
posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind of 
speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. 
They are sure there must be an answer, yet somehow 
cannot find it. So it is with his system of economy. He 
cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the 
accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a 
new dialect where there are no catchwords ready made 
for the defender; after you have been boxing for years 
on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant 
who does not scruple to hit below the belt. 

"The cost of a thing," says he, "is the amount of 
what I will call life which is required to be exchanged 
for it, immediately or in the long run." I have been 
accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 145 

that the price we have to pay for money is paid in 
liberty. Between these two ways of it, at least, the 
reader will probably not fail to find a third definition 
of his own; and it follows, on one or other, that a man 
may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in 
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bar- 
tering for it the whole of his available liberty, and be- 
coming a slave till deatli. Tliere are two questions to 
be considered — the quality of what we buy, and the price 
we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, 
a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year liveli- 
hood? and can you afford the one you want? It is a 
matter of taste ; it is not in the least degree a question of 
duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no 
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the 
Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of 
good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improb- 
able; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not 
only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the 
practice of the one does not at all train a man for 
practising the other. "Money might be of great service 
to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that 
I do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am 
not prepared to have my opportunities increased." It 
is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the per- 
sonal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider mar- 
gin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be 
generous, or anything else, except perhaps a member 
of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two hundred 
a year. 

Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved 
to be free, to be master of his times and seasons, to 
indulge the mind rather than the body; he preferred 
long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to the 
consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, 



146 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

active life among green trees to dull toiling at the 
counter of a bank. And such being his inclination he 
determined to gratify it. A poor man must save off 
something; he determined to save off his livelihood. 
"When a man has attained those things which are neces- 
sary to life," he vp^rites, "there is another alternative 
than to obtain the superfluities; he may adventure on 
life now, his vacation from humbler toil having com- 
menced." Thoreau would get shelter, some kind of 
covering for his body, and necessary daily bread; even 
these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then, his 
vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote 
himself to oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and 
the work of self-improvement. 

Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom 
and hoard against the day of sickness, was not a favor- 
ite with Thoreau. He preferred that other, whose name 
is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had se- 
cured the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon 
up possible accidents or torment himself with trouble 
for the future. He had no toleration for the man "who 
ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance 
company, which has promised to bury him decently." 
He would trust himself a little to the world. "We may 
safely trust a good deal more than we do," says he. "How 
much is not done by us ! or what if we had been taken 
sick.^" And then, with a stab of satire, he describes 
contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long 
on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers 
and commit ourselves to uncertainties." It is not likely 
that the public will be much affected by Thoreau, when 
they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they 
profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the 
same hazardous ventures ; we back our own health and 
the honesty of our neighbors for all that we are worth; 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 147 

and it is chilling to think how many must lose their 
wager. 

In 1845^ twenty-eight years old, an age by which 
the liveliest have usually declined into some conformity 
with the world, Thoreau, with a capital of something less 
than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked forth into 
the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experi- 
ment in life. He built himself a dwelling, and re- 
turned the axe, he says with characteristic and work- 
man-like pride, sharper than when he borrowed it; he 
reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, 
potatoes, and sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his 
farm to dig, and for the matter of six weeks in the 
summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or some 
other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more 
than five years, this was all that he required to do for 
his support, and he had the winter and most of the 
summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks of occupa- 
tion, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic garden- 
ing, the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his 
livelihood. Or we must rather allow that he had done 
far better ; for the thief himself is continually and 
busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a million 
will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well 
might he say, "What old people tell you you cannot do, 
you try and find you can." And how surprising is his 
conclusion: "I am convinced that to maintain oneself 
on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastiine, if we will 
live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of simpler na- 
tions are still the sports of the more artificial." 

When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed 
the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. 
There are some who could have done the one, but, vanity 
forbidding, not the other ; and that is perhaps the story 
of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own 



148 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

example, and did what he wanted squarely. And five 
years is long enough for an experiment and to prove 
the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not 
his frugality which is worthy of note ; for, to begin with, 
that was inborn, and therefore inimitable by others 
who are differently constituted; and again, it was no 
new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch 
students at the universities. The point is the sanity of 
his view of life, and the insight with which he recog- 
nized the position of money, and thought out for himself 
the problem of riches and a livelihood. Apart from his 
eccentricities, he had perceived, and was acting on, 
a truth of universal application. For money enters 
in two different characters into the scheme of life. A 
certain amount, varying with the number and empire 
of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us 
in the present order of society ; but beyond that amount, 
money is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, 
a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint our- 
selves, like any other. And there are many luxuries 
that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grate- 
ful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our in- 
clination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this conclusion 
may appear, we have only to look round us in society 
to see how scantily it has been recognized; and perhaps 
even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to 
spend a trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a 
trifle more in the article of freedom. 



Ill 

"To have done anything by which you earned money 
merely," says Thoreau, "is to be" (have been, he means) 
"idle and worse." There are two passages in his let- 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 149 

ters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which 
must be brought together to be rightly understood. So 
taken, they contain between them the marrow of all good 
sense on the subject of work in its relation to something 
broader than mere livelihood. Here is the first: "I 
suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night — 
and for what? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the 
other day, but that wasn't the final settlement. I got 
off cheaply from him. At last one will say : 'Let us see, 
how much wood did you burn, sir?' And I shall shud- 
der to think that the next question will be, 'What did 
you do while you were warm?' " Even after we have 
settled with Admetus in the person of Mr. Tarbell, 
there comes, you see, a further question. It is not 
enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earn- 
ing itself should have been serviceable to mankind, 
or something else must follow. To live is sometimes 
very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; 
and we must have a reason to allege to our own 
conscience why we should continue to exist upon this 
crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his 
house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and 
the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, 
selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat 
Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would 
have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil 
altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, 
and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the neces- 
sary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the 
more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to 
be up and doing in the interest of man. 

The second passage is this: "There is a far more 
important and warming heat, commonly lost, which pre- 
cedes the burning of the wood. It is the smoke of in- 
dustry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly 



150 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel 
was housed, I came near selling it to the ashman, as if 
I had extracted all its heat." Industry is, in itself and 
when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the 
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you 
have not, as Thoreau says, "earned money merely," 
but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. 
"We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small 
diameter of being," he says in another place; and then 
exclaims, "How admirably the artist is made to ac- 
complish his self-culture by devotion to his art!" We 
may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves 
to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some 
higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant 
from Admetus. We must all work for the sake of 
work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any 
"absorbing pursuit — it does not much matter what, so 
it be honest;" but the most profitable work is that which 
combines into one continued effort the largest propor- 
tion of the powers and desires of a man's nature; that 
into which he will plunge with ardor, and from which 
he will desist with reluctance; in which he will know 
the weariness of fatigue, but not that of satiety; and 
which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to 
his taste. Such work holds a man together, braced at 
all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it 
keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among 
superior interests; it gives him the profit of industry 
with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his 
art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree 
unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other 
professions stand apart from the human business of 
life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist's 
doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences. 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 151 

teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, 
and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe: 

"Spilt erklingt was friih erklang; 
Gluck und Ungliick wird Gesang." 

Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of 
which he had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and 
believed in good books. He said well, "Life is not 
habitually seen from any common platform so truly and 
unexaggerated as in the light of literature/* But the 
literature he loved was of the heroic order. "Books, 
not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which 
each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man 
cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained 
by, which even make us dangerous to existing institu- 
tions — such I call good books." He did not think them 
easy to be read. "The heroic books," he says, "even 
if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will 
always be in a language dead to degenerate times ; and 
we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and 
line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use per- 
mits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we 
have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily 
written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands 
our respect more than great verse," says he, "since it 
implies a more permanent and level height, a life more 
pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet 
often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is 
off again, shooting while he retreats ; but the prose writer 
has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies." We 
may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such 
works exist at all but in the imagination of the student. 
For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up 
with ballast; and those in which energy of thought 
is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be 



152 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in 
English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two 
demands of a style like poetry and sense that shall be 
both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton's Areopa- 
gitica, and can name no other instance for the moment. 
Two things at least are plain: that if a man will con- 
descend to nothing more commonplace in the way of 
reading, he must not look to have a large library; and 
that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, 
he will find his work cut out for him. 

Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at 
least exercise and composition were with him intimately 
connected; for we are told that "the length of his walk 
uniformly made the length of his writing." He speaks 
in one place of "plainness and vigor, the ornaments of 
style," which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehen- 
sively true. In another he remarks: "As for style 
of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from 
him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must 
conjecture a very large sense indeed for tlie phrase 
"if one has anything to say." When truth flows from 
a man, fittingly clothed in style and without conscious 
effort, it is because the effort has been made and the 
work practically completed before he sat down to write. 
It is only out of fulness of thinking that expression drops 
perfect like a ripe fruit; and when Thoreau wrote so 
nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had been 
vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness, 
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living 
creature till after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance 
with the subject on hand. Easy writers are those who, 
like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with a less 
degree of perfection than is legitimately within the 
compass of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and 
his clean manuscript; but in face of the evidence of 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 153 

the style itself and of the various editions of Hamlet, 
this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell 
were unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon 
called a fair copy. He who would recast a tragedy 
already given to the world must frequently and earnestly 
have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and 
in spite of his protestations, is an instance of even ex- 
treme research in one direction; and his effort after 
heroic utterance is proved not only by the occasional fin- 
ish, but by the determined exaggeration of his style. "I 
trust you realize what an exaggerator I am — that I lay 
myself out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hint- 
ing at the explanation: "Who that has heard a strain 
of music feared lest he should speak extravagantly any 
more forever?" And yet once more, in his essay on 
Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: 
"No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this 
sort of emphasis, that for the time there seemed to be 
no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and a 
parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature 
of the East, but from a desire that people should under- 
stand and realize what he was writing. He was near the 
truth upon the general question ; but in his own particu- 
lar method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature 
is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture ; 
and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehen- 
sive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a 
beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, 
is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in 
language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems 
denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the 
proper method of literature is by selection, which is a 
kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the 
literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, 
to leave out whatever does not suit his purpose. Thus 



154 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

we extract the pure gold; and thus the well-written 
story of a noble life becomes^ by its very omissions, 
more thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, 
like Thoreau, and to exaggerate directly, is to leave 
the saner classical tradition, and to put the reader on 
his guard. And when you write the whole for the half, 
you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only 
express a different thought which is not yours. 

Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-im- 
provement combined with an unfriendly criticism of life 
as it goes on in our societies ; it is there that he best 
displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of 
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain 
and vigorous, and therefore, according to his own 
formula, ornamental. Yet he did not care to follow this 
vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in books 
of a different purport. Walden, or Life in the Woods, 
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The 
Maine Woods, — such are the titles he affects. He was 
probably reminded by his delicate critical perception 
that the true business of literature is with narrative ; 
in reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys 
all its advantages, and suffers least from its defects. 
Dry precept and disembodied disquisition, as they can 
only be read with an effort of abstraction, can never 
convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural im- 
pression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed 
with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to 
the reader. Hence the effect of anecdote on simple 
minds ; and hence good biographies and works of high, 
imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but 
far more edifying, than books of theory or precept. 
Now Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the gar- 
ment of art, for that was not his talent; but he sought 
to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 155 

a similar relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts 
with a record of experience. 

Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which 
we should call mystery in a painting, and which belongs 
so particularly to the aspect of the external world and 
to its influence upon our feelings, was one which he was 
never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. 
The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their 
unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling 
response which they waken in the mind of man, con- 
tinued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared 
to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough 
to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardent- 
ly, we might transfer the glamor of reality direct upon 
our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and 
expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear 
between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. 
This was the eagle that he pursued all his life long, 
like a schoolboy with a butterfly net. Hear him to a 
friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you — to state 
to yourself precisely and completely what that walk 
over the mountains amounted to for you, returning 
to this essay again and again until you are satisfied 
that all that was important in your experience is in it. 
Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first 
dozen times you try, but at 'em again; especially when, 
after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touch- 
ing the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your 
blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. 
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long 
while to make it short." Such was the method not con- 
sistent for a man whose meanings were to "drop from 
him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most 
successful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this 
direction is to be found in the passages relating to 



156 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

fish in the Week. These are remarkable for a vivid 
truth of impression and a happy suitability of language, 
not frequently surpassed. 

Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, 
square prose, with sentences solidly built, and no help 
from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression 
— I cannot call it a progress — in his work toward a more 
and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks 
into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having 
once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to 
write something which all can read, like Robinson Cru- 
soe? and who does not see with regret that his page is 
not solid with a right materialistic treatment which de- 
lights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is 
not the right materialistic treatment which delights the 
world in Robinson, but the romantic and philosophic 
interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite 
the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, in Colonel 
Jack, to the management of a plantation. But I cannot 
help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either 
by this identical remark or by some other closely simi- 
lar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into 
a detailed materialistic treatment; he went into the 
business doggedly, as one who should make a guide-book ; 
he not only chronicled what had been important in his 
own experience, but whatever might have been impor- 
tant in the experience of anybody else ; not only what had 
affected him, but all that he saw or heard. His ardor 
had grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a 
right materialistic treatment to display such emotions 
as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he 
chose, from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later 
works of the saving quality of humor. He was not one 
of those authors who have learned, in his own words, 
"to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full quantity 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 157 

upon the reader in such books as Cape Cod, or The 
Yankee in Canada. Of the latter he confessed that he 
had not managed to get much of himself into it. Heaven 
knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, we may 
hope. "Nothing/' he says somewhere, "can shock a 
brave man but dulness." Well, there are few spots 
more shocking to the brave than the pages of The 
Yankee in Canada. 

There are but three books of his that will be read 
with much pleasure: the Week, Walden, and the col- 
lected letters. As to his poetry, Emerson's word shall 
suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily said: "The 
thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as 
in his prose, he relied greatly on the good-will of the 
reader, and wrote throughout in faith. It was an exer- 
cise of faith to suppose that many would understand 
the sense of his best work, or that any could be exhila- 
rated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. "But," as 
he says, "the gods do not hear any rude or discordant 
sound, as we learn from the echo; and I know that 
the nature toward which I launch these sounds is so 
rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve 
my rudest strain." 

IV 

"What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which 
has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listen- 
ing soul such an infinite confidence in it, even while it 
is expressing its despair?" The question is an echo 
and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it 
forms the key-note of his thoughts on friendship. No 
one else, to my knowledge, has spoken in so high and 
just a spirit of the kindly relations; and I doubt 
whether it be a drawback that these lessons should come 



158 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in 
this branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own 
intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intel- 
lectual basis of our warm^ mutual tolerations; and testi- 
mony to their worth comes with added force from one 
who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend 
remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, 
but I cannot like him." 

He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinc- 
tion between love and friendship; in such rarefied and 
freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of meditation, had 
he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too ac- 
curate an observer not to have remarked that "there 
exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality" 
between men and women; yet, he thought, "friendship 
is no respecter of sex." Perhaps there is a sense in 
which the words are true; but they were spoken in 
ignorance; and perhaps we shall have put the matter 
most correctly, if we call love a foundation for a nearer 
and freer degree of friendship than can be possible 
without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between 
persons of the same sex, which are melted and disappear 
in the warmth of love. 

To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the 
same nature and condition. "We are not what we are," 
says he^ "nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, 
but for what we are capable of being." "A friend is 
one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expect- 
ing all the virtues from us, and who can appreciate 
them in us." "The friend asks no return but that his 
friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace 
his apotheosis of him." "It is the merit and preserva- 
tion of friendship that it takes place on a level liigher 
than the actual characters of the parties would seem 
to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestal 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 159 

indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the 
last sentence, in particular, is like a light in a dark 
place, and makes many mysteries plain. We are differ- 
ent with different friends ; yet if we look closely we 
shall find that every such relation reposes on some par- 
ticular apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although 
we could not distinguish it in words from any other, we 
have at least one special reputation to preserve; and 
it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend or 
the w^oman that we love, not to hear ourselves called 
better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek 
this society to flatter ourselves with our own good 
conduct. And hence any falsehood in the relation, any 
incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even 
the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: 
"Only lovers know the value of truth." And yet again: 
"They ask for words and deeds, when a true relation 
is word and deed." 

But it follows that since they are neither of them so 
good as the other hopes, and each is, in a very honest 
manner, playing a part above his powers, such an inter- 
course must often be disappointing to both. "We may 
bid farewell sooner than complain," says Thoreau, "for 
our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered." "We 
have not so good a right to hate any as our friend." 

"It were treason to our love 
And a sin to God above, 
One iota to abate 
Of a pure, impartial hate." 

Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes believe 
me," as the song says, "Love has eyes !" The nearer 
the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthi- 
ness of those we love; and because you love one, and 
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, 



160 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

and you never will forgive, that friend's misconduct. 
If you want a person's faults, go to those who love 
him. They will not tell you, but they know. And 
herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it 
endures this knowledge without change. 

It required a cold, distant personality like that of 
Thoreau, perhaps, to recognize and certainly to utter 
this truth ; for a more human love makes it a point of 
honor not to acknowledge those faults of which it is 
most conscious. But his point of view is both higli 
and dry. He has no illusions ; he does not give way to 
love any more than to hatred, but preserves them both 
with care like valuable curiosities. A more bald-headed 
picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom 
been presented. He is an egoist; he does not remem- 
ber, or does not think it worth while to remark, that, 
in these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times disap- 
pointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are 
disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem 
most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us ; 
and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are con- 
tinually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh en- 
deavor. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is 
profit he is after in these intimacies ; moral profit, cer- 
tainly, but still profit to himself. If you will be the 
sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, "my education 
cannot dispense with your society." His education ! as 
though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, 
not one word about pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or 
any quality of flesh and blood. It was not inappropri- 
ate, surely, that he had such close relations with the 
fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, 
when he cried: "As for taking his arm, I would as soon 
think of taking the arm of an elm-tree !" 

As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken en- 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 161 

joyment in his intimacies. lie says he has been per- 
petually on the brink of the sort of intercourse he 
wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what 
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy 
phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down into it"? Truly, so 
it will be always if you only stroll in upon your friends 
as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and even 
then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with 
some afterthought of self -improvement, as though you 
had come to the cricket match to bet. It was his theory 
that people saw each other too frequently, so that their 
curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they any- 
thing fresh to communicate; but friendship must be 
something else than a society for mutual improvement — 
indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some ex- 
tent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man 
instead of a manner of elm-tree, lie would have felt 
that he saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped 
benefits unknown to his philosophy from a more sus- 
tained and easy intercourse. We might remind him 
of his own words about love: "We should have no re- 
serve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that 
business. But commonly men have not imagination 
enough to be thus employed about a human being, but 
must be coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading 
oriental philosophers. It is not the nature of the rival 
occupation, it is the fact that you suffer it to be a rival, 
that renders loving intimacy impossible. Nothing is 
given for nothing in this world; there can be no true 
love, even on your own side, without devotion; devotion 
is the exercise of love, by which it grows ; but if you 
will give enough of that, if you will pay the price in a 
sufficient "amount of what you call life," why then, 
indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have 
months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasur- 



162 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

able_, and yet improving intercourse as shall make time 
a moment of kindness^ a delight. 

The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, 
of which he had no tincture, but part in his engrossing 
design of self-improvement and part in the real defici- 
encies of social intercourse. He was not so much diffi- 
cult about his fellow human beings as he could not 
tolerate the terms of their association. He could take 
to a man for any genuine qualities, as we see by his 
admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter in Walden; 
but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly 
fabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed 
to him, I think, that society is precisely the reverse of 
friendship, in that it takes place on a lower level than 
the characters of any of the parties would warrant us 
to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant 
man is of greatly less account than what you will get 
from him in (as the French say) a little committee. 
And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not enough of 
the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop 
into a parlor and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a 
human being from that dreary port ; nor had he inclina- 
tion for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature 
as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow- 
creatures, — a melancholy, lean degeneration of the hu- 
man character. 

"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he 
thus sums up: "Any comparison is impertinent. It is 
an idling down on the plain at the base of the mountain 
instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you 
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up 
with? Will you go to glory with me? is the burden of 
the song. It is not that we love to be alone, but that 
we love to soar, and when we do soar the company 
grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 163 

is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the 
mount, or a very private ecstacy still higher up. Use all 
the society that will abet you." But surely it is no 
very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to 
receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above 
all, where there is no question of service upon either 
side, that it is good to enjoy their company like a natural 
man. It is curious and in some ways dispiriting that a 
writer may be always best corrected out of his own 
mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage 
from Thoreau which seems aimed directly at himself: 
"Do not be too moral; you may cheat yourself out of 
much life so ... All fables, indeed, have their morals; 
but the innocent enjoy the story." 



V 

"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right 
to assume is to do at any time what I think right." 
"Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, 
to ask a neighbor's advice?" "There is a nearer neigh- 
bor within who is incessantly telling us how we should 
behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell 
us of some false, easier way." "The greater part of 
what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be 
bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are 
capable of becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when 
we fall behind ourselves" that "we are cursed with 
duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the wild," he 
says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life 
of a good man will hardly improve us more than the 
life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as 
plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and 
[mark this] ouf lives are sustained by a nearly equal 



164 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

expense of virtue of some hind." Even although he 
were a prig, it will be owned he could announce a start- 
ling doctrine. "As for doing good_," he writes elsewhere, 
"that is one of the professions that are full. Moreover, 
I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am 
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. 
Probably I should not conscientiously and deliberately 
forsake my particular calling to do the good which so- 
ciety demands of me, to save the universe from an- 
nihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater 
steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. 
If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philan- 
thropies, do not let your left hand know what your right 
hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere he 
returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning 
thus: "If I ever did a man any good in their sense, of 
course it was something exceptional and insignificant 
compared with the good or evil I am constantly doing 
by being what I am," 

There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, 
in this unshaken confidence in himself and indifference 
to the wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others. In his 
whole works I find no trace of pity. This was partly 
the result of theory, for he held the world too mys- 
terious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What 
right have I to grieve who have not ceased to wonder.^" 
But it sprang still more from constitutional indifference 
and superiority; and he grew up healthy, composed, 
and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green 
bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack 
in himself that he failed to do justice to the spirit of 
Christ; for while he could glean more meaning from 
individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet 
he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed 
it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and pur- 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 165 

port of the doctrine as a whole seems to have passed 
him by or left him unimpressed. He could understand 
the idealism of the Christian view, but he was himself 
so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognize the 
human intention and essence of that teaching. Hence he 
complained that Christ did not leave us a rule that was 
proper and sufficient for this world, not having con- 
ceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; for 
things of that character that are sufficiently unaccept- 
able become j^ositively non-existent to the mind. But 
perhaps we shall best appreciate the defect in Thoreau 
by seeing it supplied in the case of Whitman. For the 
one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other ; it is 
what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so up- 
roariously bawls ; it is the same doctrine, but with how 
immense a difference ! the same argument, but used 
to what a new conclusion ! Thoreau had plenty of 
humor until he tutored himself out of it, and so for- 
feited that best birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, 
in that respect, seems to have been sent into the world 
naked and unashamed ; and yet by a strange consumma- 
tion, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, 
and claustral. Of these two philosophies so nearly 
identical at bottom, the one pursues Self-improvement — 
a churlish, mangy dog; the other is up with the morning, 
in the best of health, and following the nymph Happi- 
ness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, 
is not solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, 
for it depends on them for its existence ; it sanctions and 
encourages to all delights that are not unkind in them- 
selves ; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make 
excision of a single humorous passage ; and while the 
self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if he be 
not of an excellent constitution, may even grow de- 
formed into an Obermann, the very name and appear- 



16G HENRY DAVID THOREAU: 

ance of a happy man breathe of good-nature^ and help 
the rest of us to live. 

In the case of Thoreau^ so great a show of doctrine 
demands some outcome in the field of action. If nothing 
were to be done but build a shanty beside Walden Pond, 
we have heard altogether too much of these declarations 
of independence. That the man wrote some books is 
nothing to the purpose_, for the same has been done in 
a suburban villa. That he kept himself happy is per- 
haps a sufficient excuse, but it is disappointing to the 
reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despises 
commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good 
so soaring that he must take himself apart from mankind 
for their cultivation, we will not be content without some 
striking act. It was not Thoreau's fault if he were 
not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have 
made a noble ending. As it is, he did once seek to 
interfere in the world's course; he made one practical 
appearance on the stage of affairs ; and a strange one 
it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and 
the eccentricity of the man. It was forced on him by 
his calm but radical opposition to negro slavery. "Voting 
for the right is doing nothing for it," he saw; "it is only 
expressing to men feebly your desire that it should pre- 
vail." For his part, he would not "for an instant recog- 
nize that political organization for his government which 
is the slave's government also." "I do not hesitate to 
saj"," he adds, "that those who call themselves Aboli- 
tionists should at once effectually withdraw their sup- 
port, both in person and property, from the government 
of Massachusetts." That is what he did: in 1843 he 
ceased to pay the poll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, 
for he said he was as desirous to be a good neighbor 
as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to the State 
of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was 



HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 167 

a polity unto himself; or, as he explains it with ad- 
mirable sense, "In fact, I quietly declare war with the 
State after my fashion, though I will still make what 
use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual 
in such cases." He was put in prison; but that was 
a part of his design. "Under a government which im- 
prisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is 
also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, 
if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name — ay, if 
one HONEST man in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing 
to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this 
copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail, 
therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. 
For it matters not how small the beginning may seem 
to be; what is once well done is done forever." Such* 
was his theory of civil disobedience. 

And the upshot.^ A friend paid the tax for him; 
continued year by year to pay it in the sequel; and 
Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested. It 
was a fiasco, but to me it does not seem laughable; even 
those who joined in the laughter at the moment would 
be insensibly affected by this quaint instance of a good 
man's horror for injustice. We may compute the worth 
of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a 
hundred voters at some subsequent election: and if 
Thoreau had possessed as great a power of persuasion 
as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a party how- 
ever small, if his example had been followed by a hun- 
dred or by thirty of his fellows^ I cannot but believe it 
would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and 
justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so 
little fervor, for we are not witnesses to the suffering 
they cause ; but when we see them wake an active horror 
in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbor prefer to lie 
in prison rather than be so much as passively implicated 



168 SAMUEL PEPYS 

in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin 
to realize them with ■ a quicker pulse. 

Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John 
Brown was taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the 
first to come forward in his defence. The committee 
wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature. 
"I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to 
announce tliat I was to speak," I have used the word 
"defence"; in truth he did not seek to defend him, even 
declared it would be better for the good cause that he 
should die; but he praised his action as I think Brown 
would have liked to hear it praised. 

Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, 
wedded to a character of so much strength, singleness, 
and purity, pursued its own path of self-improvement 
for more than half a century, part gymnosophist, part 
backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in 
a subaltern attitude, into the field of political history. 

Note. — For many facts in the above essay, among which I 
may mention the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to 
Thoreau: His Life and Aims, by J. A. Page, or, as is well 
known. Dr. Japp. 



SAMUEL PEPYS 

(1881) 

In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown 
on the character and position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. 
Mynors Bright has given us a new transcription of the 
Diary, increasing it in bulk by near a third, correcting 
many errors, and completing our knowledge of the 
man in some curious and important points. We can 
only regret that he has taken liberties with the author 



SAMUEL PEPYS 169 

and the public. It is no part of the duties of an editor 
of an established classic to decide what may or may 
not be "tedious to the reader." The book is either an 
historical document or not, and in condemning Lord 
Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As for the 
time-honored phrase_, "unfit for publication/' without 
being cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a pre- 
caution more or less commercial; and we may think, 
without being sordid, that when we purchase six huge 
and distressingly expenfiive volumes, we are entitled to 
be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like 
children. But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we 
complain, we are still grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide 
our obligation, brings together, clearly and with no lost 
words, a body of illustrative material. Sometimes we 
might ask a little more; never, I think, less. And as 
a matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's volume 
might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to 
the margin of the text, for it is precisely what the reader 
wants. 

In the light of these two books, at least, we have 
now to read our author. Between them they contain 
all we can expect to learn for, it may be, many years. 
Now, if ever, we should be able to form some notion 
of that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind — 
unparalleled for three good reasons: first, because he 
was a man known to his contemporaries in a halo of 
almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants 
with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade; 
second, because he has outstripped all competitors in the 
art or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, 
third, because, being in many ways a very ordinary per- 
son, he has yet placed himself before the public eye 
with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as 
might be envied by a genius like Montaigne. Not then 



170 SAMUEL PEPYS 

for his own sake only^ but as a character in a unique 
position, endowed with a uniqwe talent, and shedding a 
unique light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he 
is surely worthy of prolonged and patient study. 

THE DIARY 

That there should be such a book as Pepys's Diary 
is incomparably strange, Pepys, in a corrupt and idle 
period, played the man in public employments, toiling 
hard and keeping his honor bright. Much of the little 
good that is set down to James the Second comes by 
right to Pepys; and if it were little for a king, it is 
much for a subordinate. To his clear, capable head 
was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on 
the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, 
this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some con- 
siderable share. He stood well by his business in the 
appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected 
by some of the best and wisest men in England. He 
was President of the Royal Society; and when he came 
to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour — 
thinking it needless to say more — that it was answer- 
able to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in 
dignity, guards of soldiers* sometimes attending him in 
his walks, subalterns bowing before his periwig; and 
when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable to his 
state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him 
writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the 
late Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story 
of the repulse of the Great Armada: "Sir, you will not 
wonder at the backwardness of my thanks for the pres- 
ent you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect 
of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it, 
when I have told you that the sight of it hath led me 
to such reflections on my particular interest, by my 



SAMUEL PEPYS 171 

employment, in the reproaeft due to that miscarriage, 
as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied 
to have who found his face in Michael Angelo's hell. 
The same should serve me also in excuse for my silence 
in celebrating your mastery shown in the design and 
draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge 
me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture 
of our House of Lords changed from the story of '88 
to that of '67 (of Evelyn's designing), till the pravity 
of this were reformed to the temper of that age, wherein 
God Almighty found his blessings more operative than, 
I fear, he doth in ours his judgments." 

This is a letter honorable to the writer, where the 
meaning rather than the words is eloquent. Such wias 
the account he gave of himself to his contemporaries ; 
such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language : 
giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public 
servant. We turn to the same date in the Diary by 
which he is known, after two centuries, to his de- 
scendants. The entry begins in the same key with the 
letter, blaming the "madness of the House of Com- 
mons" and "the base proceedings, just the epitome of 
all our public proceedings in this age, of the House 
of Lords;" and then, without the least transition, this 
is how our diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my 
bookseller's, and there bought an idle, roguish French 
book, L'escholle des Filles, which I have bought in plain 
binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, be- 
cause I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, 
that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among 
them, to disgrace them, if it should be found." Even 
in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly 
apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be 
notable; but what about the man, I do not say who 
bought a roguish book, but who was ashamed of doing 



172 SAMUEL PEPYS 

so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the 
shame in the pages of his daily journal? 

We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat 
drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a 
given moment we apprehend our character and acts by 
some particular side; we are merry with one, grave 
with another, as befits the nature and demands of the 
relation. Pepys's letter to Evelyn would have little 
in common with that other one to jNIrs. Knipp which he 
signed by the pseudonym of Dapper Dicky; yet each 
would be suitable to the character of his correspondent. 
There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean 
animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company 
and surroundings; and these changes are the better 
part of his education in the world. To strike a posture 
once for all, and to march through life like a drum- 
major, is to be highly disagreeable to others and a fool 
for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp 
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he 
posing in the Diary, and what, in the name of astonish- 
ment, was the nature of the pose.^ Had he suppressed 
all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried 
in the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, 
in either case we should have made him out. But 
no; he is full of precautions to conceal the "disgrace" 
of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole 
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human 
action, which we can exactly parallel from another part 
of the Diary. 

Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just com- 
plaints against her husband, and written it in plain and 
very pungent English. Pepys, in an agony lest the 
world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys 
the tell-tale document ; and then — you disbelieve your 
eyes — down goes the whole story with unsparing truth 



SAMUEL PEPYS 173 

and in the crudest detail. It seems he has no design 
but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private 
book to prove he. was not. You are at first faintly 
reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid religious 
diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance dis- 
appears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify ; 
it is not from repentance that he chronicles his pecca- 
dilloes; for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be 
just to him, there often follows some improvement. 
Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very for- 
mal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But 
in Pepys you come upon good, substantive misde- 
meanors ; beams in his eye of which he alone remains 
unconscious ; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, 
and laughable subterfuges to himself that always com- 
mand belief and often engage the sympathies. 

Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to 
liimself in the world, sowed his wild oats late, took late 
to industry, and preserved till nearly forty the headlong 
gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in 
which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of 
sentiments which with most of us are over and done be- 
fore the age of twelve. In our tender years we still pre- 
serve a freshness of surprise at our prolonged existence ; 
events make an impression out of all proportion to their 
consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own 
past adventures, and look forward to our future person- 
ality with sentimental interest. It was something of this, 
I think, that clung to Pepys. Although not sentimental 
in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental about himself. 
His own past clung about liis heart, an evergreen. He 
was the slave of an association. He could not pass by 
Islington, where his father used to carry him to cakes 
and ale, but he must light at the "King's Head" and eat 
and drink "for remembrance of the old house Scke." 



174 SAMUEL PEPYS 

He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to 
renew his old walks^ "where Mrs. Hely and I did use 
to walk and talk, with whom I had the first sentiments 
of love and pleasure in a woman's company, discourse 
and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." 
He goes about weighing up the Assurance, which lay 
near Woolwich under water, and cries in a parenthesis, 
"Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in, in Captain 
Holland's time;" and after revisiting the Nasehy, now 
changed into the Charles, he confesses "it was a great 
pleasure to myself to see the ship that I began my good 
fortune in." The stone that he was cut for he preserved 
in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such grati- 
tude for their assistance that for years, and after he 
had begun to mount himself into higher zones, he con- 
tinued to have that family to dinner on the anniversary 
of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more 
romantic passion for their past, although at times they 
might express it more romantically ; and if Pepys shared 
with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who 
left behind him the Confessions, or Hazlitt, who wrote 
the Liber Amoris, and loaded his essays with loving 
personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied 
egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, 
to be more exact, it is the first that makes the second 
either possible or pleasing. 

But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must 
return once more to the experience of children. I can 
remember to have written, in the fly-leaf of more than 
one book, the date and the place where I then was — 
if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain 
garden; these were jottings for my future self; if I 
should chance on such a note in after years, I thought 
it would cause me a particular thrill to recognize myself 
across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come 



SAMUEL PEPYS 175 

upon them now, and not be moved one tittle — which 
shows that I have comparatively failed in life, and 
grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we 
can find more than one such note of perfect childish 
egotism; as when he explains that his candle is going 
out, "which makes me write thus slobberingly ;" or as 
in this incredible particularity, "To my study, where I 
only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this*, 
and so out again;" or lastly, as here, with more of cir- 
cumstance: "I staid up till the bellman came by with 
his bell under my window, as I was writing of this very 
line, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, 
windy morning.' " Such passages are not to be mis- 
understood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence 
is unmistakable. He desires that dear, though unknown, 
gentleman, keenly to realize his predecessor; to remem- 
ber why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall 
(let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the 
chill of the early, windy morning, and the very line his 
own romantic self was scribing at the moment. The 
man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences — a 
sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in 
distress, and turns some others into sentimental liber- 
tines: and the whole book, if you will but look at it in 
that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys's own 
address. 

Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable atti- 
tude preserved by him throughout his Diary, to that 
unflinching — I had almost said, that unintelligent — 
sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. 
He was not unconscious of his errors — far from it ; 
he was often startled into shame, often reformed, often 
made and broke his vows of change. But whether he 
did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; 
still that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to 



176 SAMUEL PEPYS 

write; and still sure of his own affectionate indulgence, 
when the parts should be changed, and the writer come 
to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said, 
or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a 
character of his career; and as, to himself, he was more 
interesting than Moses or than Alexander, so all should 
be faithfully set down. I have called his Diary a work 
of art. Now when the artist has found something, word 
or deed, exactly proper to a favorite character in play 
or novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, 
though the remark be silly or the act mean. The hesita- 
tion of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness 
of Emma Bovary, or tli^ irregularities of Mr. Swivel- 
ler, caused neither disappointment nor disgust to their 
creators. And so with Pepys and his adored pro- 
tagonist; adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight 
and enduring human toleration, I have gone over and 
over the greater part of the Diary ; and the points where, 
to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not per- 
fectly sincere, are so few^ so doubtful, and so petty, 
that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that 
we all of us write such a diary in airy characters upon 
our brain; but I fear there is a distinction to be made; 
I fear that as we render to our consciousness an account 
of our daily fortunes and behavior, we too often weave 
a tissue of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and 
even if Pepys were the ass and coward that men call 
him, we must take rank as sillier and more cowardly 
than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are 
all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see 
it, that was what he saw clearly and set down unspar- 
ingly. 

It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried 
on in the same single spirit in which it was begun. 
Pepys was not such an ass but he must have perceived. 



SAMUEL PEPYS 177 

as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work 
he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew 
what other books were like. It must, at least, have 
crossed his mind that some one might ultimately de- 
cipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains 
and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and 
the thought, although discouraged, must have warmed 
his heart. He was not such an ass, besides, but he must 
have been conscious of the deadly explosives, the gun- 
cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his 
drawer. Let some contemporary light upon the Journal, 
and Pepys was plunged forever in social and political 
disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors by 
two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its 
youth, he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieu- 
tenant in the navy; but in 1669, when it was already 
near an end, he could have bitten his tongue out, as 
the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one 
so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And 
from two other facts I think we may infer that he had 
entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought 
of a far-distant publicity. The first is of capital impor- 
tance : the Diary was not destroyed. The second — 
that he took unusual precautions to confound the cipher 
in "roguish" passages — proves, beyond question, that 
he was thinking of some other reader besides himself. 
Perhaps while his friends were admiring the "greatness 
of his behavior" at the approach of death, he may have 
had a twinkling hope of immortality. Mens cuj usque 
is est quisque, said his chosen motto ; and, as he had 
stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the 
pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left 
behind him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no 
other instance so remarkable of the desire of man for 
publicity and an enduring name. The greatness of his 



178 SAMUEL PEPYS 

life was open, yet he longed to communicate its small- 
ness also; and, while contemporaries bowed before him, 
he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his peri- 
wig was once alive with nits. But this thought, although 
I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor his 
deepest ; it did not color one word that he wrote ; and 
the Diary, for as long as he kept it, remained what it 
was when he began, a private pleasure for himself. It 
was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleas- 
ures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these 
solemn words, when he closed that confidant for ever: 
"And so I betake myself to that course which is almost 
as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which, 
and all the discomforts that will accompany my being 
blind, the good God prepare me." 

A LIBERAL GENIUS 

Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when 
he had taken physic, composing "a song in praise of a 
liberal genius (such as I take my own to be) to all 
studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but 
the Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was 
seeking; and his portrait by Hales, so admirably re- 
produced in Mynors Bright's edition, is a confirmation 
of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his 
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of 
trouble, almost breaking his neck "to have the portrait 
full of shadows," and draping him in an Indian gown 
hired expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied 
about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the 
essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the 
Diary or the Diary by the picture, we shall at least 
agree that Hales was among the number of those who 
can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have 
a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, pro- 



SAMUEL PEPYS 179 

tuberant, and yet apt for weeping too; a nose great 
alike in character and dimensions; and altogether a 
most fleshly, melting eountenance. The face is attrac- 
tive by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the 
word greedy, but tlie reader must not suppose that he 
can change it for that closely kindred one of hungry, 
for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better 
things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could 
never be the face of an artist; it is the face of a mveur 
— kindly, pleased and pleasing, protected from excess 
and upheld in contentment by the shifting versatility 
of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be 
called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one 
may balance and control another. 

The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a 
garden of Armida. Wherever h6 went, his steps were 
winged with the most eager expectation; whatever he 
did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An 
insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and 
all the secrets of knowledge, filled him brimful of the 
longing to travel, and supported him in the toils of 
study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never 
happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal 
City. When he was in Holland, he was "with child" 
to see any strange thing. Meeting some friends and 
singing with them in a palace near The Hague, his pen 
fails him to express his passion of delight, "the more 
so because in a heaven of pleasure and in a strange 
country." He must go to see all famous executions. 
He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, de- 
faced "with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my 
hand now shake to write of it." He learned to dance, 
and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to sing, 
and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to my- 
self (which is now my constant practice) the trillo." 



180 SAMUEL PEPYS 

He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and 
the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his intention if he 
did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned 
to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme 
and theory of music not yet ever made in the world." 
When he heard "a fellow whistle like a bird exceeding 
well," he promised to return another day and give an 
angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took 
the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale and tide 
reached up that night to the Hope, taking great pleasure 
in learning the seamen's manner of singing when they 
sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his 
Latin grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He 
was a member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, 
and of the Royal Society before it had received the 
name. Boyle's Hydrostatics was "of infinite delight" 
to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him compar- 
ing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, 
deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him, in a 
single year, studying timber and the measurement of 
timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing 
cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the 
rigging of ships from a model; and "looking and im- 
proving himself of the (naval) stores with" — hark to 
the fellow! — r"great delight." His familiar spirit of 
delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true 
it was to him through life ! He is only copying some- 
thing, and behold, he "takes great pleasure to rule the 
lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink;" 
he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, 
and behold, "it do please him exceedingly." A hog's 
harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot ride 
home in my Lord Sandwich's coach — but he must exclaim,^ 
with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When 
he is bound for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut 



SAMUEL PEPYS 181 

of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to see my 
childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying 
it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was a hundred 
limes." To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the 
nightingales and other birds, hear fiddles, and there 
a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and 
there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And 
the nightingales, I take it, were particularly dear to 
him; and it was again "with great pleasure" that he 
paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while 
the fog was rising and the April sun broke through. 

He must always be doing something agreeable, and, 
by preference, two agreeable things at once. In his 
house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an 
eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes, 
lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an 
empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached 
eggs, he must put in the time by playing on the flageolet ; 
if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book of Tobit 
or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest 
women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his 
pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were 
silent; and even along the streets of London, with so 
many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be 
saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, 
pictures, etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant 
of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in 
pleasure ; like the princess in the fairy story, he was 
conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he 
loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a con- 
versation when he thought himself unsuitably dressed. 
Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how to eat 
alone;" pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and 
the eye and ear must be flattered like the palate ere he 
avow himself content. He had n9 zest in a good dinner 



182 SAMUEL PEPYS 

when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street and in a peri- 
wig-maker's house"; and a collation was spoiled for him 
by indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing 
him yeoman's service in this breathless chase of pleas- 
ures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions that he went to 
bed "weary, which I seldom am"; and already over 
thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a 
comet. But it is never pleasure that exhausts the 
pleasure-seeker; for in that career, as in all others, it 
is failure that kills. The man who enj oys so wholly and 
bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, 
is just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry 
question of his right to fiddle on the leads, or to be 
"vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his wife's attire; 
and we find in consequence that he was always peevish 
when he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily" 
after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his 
aim in life; his remedy in care was the same as his 
delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure, and with 
pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow; and, 
whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking from a 
bailiff, he would equally take refuge in the theatre. 
There, if the house be full and the company noble, if 
the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play 
diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private 
self-adorer, will speedily be healed of his distresses. 

Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of 
meat, a tune upon the fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, 
Pepys was pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, 
the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his fel- 
low-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling 
humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle 
vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best 
equipped of all to love his neighbors. And perhaps 
it is in this sense that charity may be most properly 



SAMUEL PEPYS 183 

said to begin at home. It does not matter what quality 
a person has: Pepys can appreciate and love him for it. 
He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of Lady Castlemaine; 
indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her 
for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, 
he will walk miles to have another sight of her; and 
even when a lady by a mischance spat upon his clothes, 
he was immediately consoled when he had observed that 
she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted 
to see Mrs. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his 
aunt James: "a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, 
talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so 
much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken 
with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less 
taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. He is jolly 
with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest and 
patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the story of 
a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends 
a critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. 
He spends an evening at Vauxhall with "Killigrew and 
young Newport — loose company," says he, "but worth 
a man's being in for once, to know the nature of it, and 
their manner of talk and lives." And when a rag-boy 
lights him home, he examines him about his business 
and other ways of livelihood for destitute children. 
This is almost half-way to the beginning of philan- 
thropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, 
Pepys had perhaps been a man famous for good deeds. 
And it is through this quality that he rises, at times, 
superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the 
love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is filled 
with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only 
knows by sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with 
her in her successes; and it is not untrue, however 
strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved 



184 SAMUEL PEPYS 

his maid Jane because she was in love with his man 
Tom. 

Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women 
and W. Hewer and I walked upon the Downes, where 
a flock of sheep was ; and the most pleasant and innocent 
sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd 
and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight 
of people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to 
me, which he did with the forced tone that children do 
usually read, that was mighty pretty; and then I did 
give him something, and went to the father, and talked 
with him. He did content himself mightily in my liking 
his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most 
like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my 
life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of 
the world in my mind for two or three days after. We 
took notice of his woollen knit stockings of two colors 
mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at the toe 
and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet, 
which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of them, 
'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes, you see, are full 
of stones, and we are f aine to shoe ourselves thus ; and 
these,' says he, 'will make the stones fly till they ring 
before me.' I did give the poor man something, for 
which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast 
stones with his home crooke. He values his dog 
mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he 
would have him, when he goes to fold them; told me 
there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and 
that he hath four shillings a week the year round for 
keeping of them ; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields 
here, did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever 
I saw in my life." 

And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's 
pleasuring; with cups of milk, and glow-worms, and 



SAMUEL PEPYS 185 

people walking at sundown with their wives and chil- 
dren, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming "of 
the old age of the world" and the early innocence of 
man. This was how he walked through life, his eyes 
and ears wide open, and his hand, you will observe, not 
shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and 
the manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of 
detail and yet a lingering glamor of romance. 

It was "two or three days after" that he extended 
this passage in the pages of his Journal, and the style 
has thus the benefit of some reflection. It is generally 
supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank at the bot- 
tom of the scale of merit. But a style which is inde- 
fatigably lively, telling, and picturesque through six 
large volumes of everyday experience, which deals with 
the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, 
which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and 
yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the 
narrative, — such a style may be ungrammatical, it 
may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but 
it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true 
function of the writer has been thoroughly performed 
throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may 
be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed 
and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight. 
The gusto of the man speaks out fierily after all these 
years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, 
to return to that half-whimsical approximation, is one 
of quality but not one of degree; in his sphere, Pepys 
felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of poetry — 
prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and 
earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. 
Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shep- 
herd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire convic- 
tion and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing 



186 SAMUEL PEPYS 

fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change 
it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, 
a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored reminiscence 
of your own-. 

There never was a man nearer being an artist, who 
yet was not one. The tang was in the family; while 
he was writing the Journal for our enjoyment in his 
comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of 
his cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to 
make music to the country girls. But he himself, though 
he could play so many instruments and pass judgment 
in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is 
not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some 
greater power to understand. That he did not like 
Shakespeare as an artist for the stage may be a fault, 
but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He cer- 
tainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond 
mere actors on the rolls of that innumerable army who 
have got "To be or not to be" by heart. Nor was he 
content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it to 
himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where 
angels fear to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, in- 
deed, is more notable than the heroic quality of the 
verses that our little sensualist in a periwig chose out 
to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from 
brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as 
he sat tuning his sublime theorbo. "To be* or not to be. 
Whether 'tis nobler" — "Beauty retire, thou dost my pity 
move" — "It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome;" — 
open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in 
the sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no 
timid, spirit that selected such a range of themes. Of 
"Gaze not on Swans," I know, no more than these four 
words; yet that also seems to promise well. It was, 
however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master. 



SAMUEL PEPYS 187 

Mr. Berkenshaw — as the drawings that figure at the 
breaking up of a young ladies' seminary are the work 
of the professor attached to the establishment. Mr. 
Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil. The 
amateur cannot usually rise into the artist^ some leaven 
of the world still clogging him; and we find Pepys be- 
having like a pickthank to the man who taught him 
composition. In relation to the stage_, which he so 
warmly loved and understood, he was not only more 
hearty, but more generous to others. Thus he encount- 
ers Colonel Reames, "a man/' says he, "who understands 
and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it." 
And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridicu- 
lous insipid piece, "Glad we were," he writes, "that Bet- 
terton had no part in it." It is by such a zeal and loy- 
alty to those who labor for his delight that the amateur 
grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in 
mind that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced 
to recognize his betters. There was not one speck of 
envy in the whole human-hearted egotist. 

RESPECTABILITY 

When writers inveigh against respectability, in the 
present degraded meaning of the word, they are usually 
suspected of a taste for clay pipes and beer cellars ; and 
their performances are thought to hail from the Owl's 
Nest of the comedy. They have something more, how- 
ever, in their eye than the dulness of a round million 
dinner parties that sit down yearly in old England. For 
to do anything because others do it, and not because the 
thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to 
resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, 
and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number. 
We smile over the ascendency of priests; but I had 
rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders 



188 SAMUEL PEPYS 

of society. No life can better than that of Pepys illus- 
trate the dangers of this respectable theory of living. 
For what can be more untoward than the occurrence^ at 
a critical period and while the habits are still pliable, 
of such a sweeping transformation as the return of 
Charles the Second? Round went the whole fleet of 
England on the other tack; and while a few tall pintas, 
Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by the stars 
and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, 
must go about with the majority among "the stupid 
starers and the loud huzzas." 

The respectable are not led so much by any desire of 
applause as by a positive need for countenance. The 
weaker and the tamer the man, the more will he require 
this support; and any positive quality relieves him, by 
just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, 
Pepys was quite strong enough to please himself without 
regard for others; but his positive qualities were not co- 
exte-nsive with the field of conduct; and in many parts 
of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the foot- 
prints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, 
particularly, he lived by the countenance of others; felt 
a slight from another more keenly than a meanness in 
himself; and then first repented when he was found out. 
You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; 
and b}^ the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and 
apprehension, he could rise, as it were dramatically, to 
the significance of what you said. All that matter in 
religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness 
was strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should 
make a man rudely virtuous, following right in good re- 
port and ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling- 
block to Pepys. He was rhuch thrown across the 
Friends; and nothing can be more instructive than his 
attitude toward these most interesting people of that 



SAMUEL PEPYS 189 

age. I have mentioned how he conversed with one as 
he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting un- 
der arrest, "I would to God," said he, "they would either 
conform, or be more wise and not be catched" ; and to 
a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid though 
effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up 
next door to him that beautiful nature, William Pen. It 
is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop ; odd, though 
natural enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys 
was jealous of him with his wife. But the cream of the 
story is when Pen publishes his Sandy Foundation 
Shaken, and Pepys has it read aloud by his wife. "I 
find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it is too good 
for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of 
book, and not jit for everybody to read." Nothing is 
more galling to the merely respectable than to be 
brought in contact with religious ardor. Pepys had his 
own foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from 
practical considerations, and he would read the book 
with true uneasiness of spirit; for conceive the blow if, 
by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert him! 
It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profit- 
able for himself and others. "A good sermon of Mr. 
Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye first the king- 
dom of heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good 
and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that 
righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than 
sin and villainy." It is thus that respectable people de- 
sire to have their Greathearts address them, telling, in 
mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, 
and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or 
troublesome reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of 
Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of worldly pru- 
dence, and a handy-book for Pepys and the successful 
merchant. 



190 SAMUEL PEPYS 

The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He 
has no idea of truth except for the Diary. He has no 
Icare that a thing shall be, if it but appear; gives out 
that he has inherited a good estate, when he has seem- 
ingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be 
thought liberal M^ien he knows he has been mean. He is 
conscientiously ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with 
reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like 
Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to 
his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous 
periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with 
the fashions, Aot foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, 
the central movement of his age. For long he durst 
not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would 
have been improper; but a time comes, with the growth 
of his fortune, when the impropriety has shifted to the 
other side, and he is "ashamed to be seen in a hackney." 
Pepys talked about being "a Quaker or some very mel- 
ancholy thing" ; for my part, I can imagine nothing so 
melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be con- 
cerned about such problems. But so respectability and 
the duties of society haunt and burden their poor dev- 
otees; and what seems at first the very primrose path 
of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And 
the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respect- 
able, when he must not only order his pleasures, but 
even clip his virtuous movements, to the public patter of 
the age. There was some juggling among officials to 
avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, 
growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge 
himself with £1000; but finding none to set him an ex- 
ample, "nobody of our ablest merchants" with this mod- 
erate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent;" 
he feared it would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather 
than appear singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One 



SAMUEL PEPYS 191 

able merchant's countenance, and Pepys had dared to do 
an honest act ! Had he found one brave spirit, properly- 
recognized by society, he might have gone far as a dis- 
ciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid 
scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of 
liis senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the devil ; 
but, on the other hand. Sir William Coventry can raise 
him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is 
with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What 
does he care for office or emolument? "Thank God, I 
have enough of my own," says he, "to buy me a good 
book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And 
again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an 
ungrateful country shall have dismissed them from the 
field of public service; Coventry living retired in a fine 
house, and Pepys dropping in, "it may be, to read a 
chapter of Seneca." 

Under this influence, the only good one in his life, 
Pepys continued zealous and, for the period, pure in his 
employment. He would not be "bribed to be unjust," 
he says, though he was "not so squeamish as to refuse 
a present after," suppose the king to have received no 
wrong. His new arrangement for the victualling of 
Tangier, he tells us with honest complacency, will save 
the king a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred 
pounds a year — a statement which exactly fixes the de- 
gree of the age's enlightenment. But for his industry 
and capacity no praise can be too high. It was an un- 
ending struggle for the man to stick to his business in 
such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the 
story of his oaths, so often broken, so courageously re- 
newed, is worthy rather of admiration than the con- 
tempt it has received. 

Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's in- 
fluence, we find him losing scruples and daily complying 



192 SAMUEL PEPYS 

further with the age. When he began the Journal, he 
was a trifle prim and puritanic ; merry enough, to be 
sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Mag- 
dalen ale and his acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of 
Cambridge. But youth is a hot season with all; when a 
man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble ; 
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the 
better things that he approved and followed after, we 
may even say were strict. Where there was "tag, rag, 
and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he felt 
**ashamed, and went away" ; and when he slept in church, 
he prayed God forgive him. In but a little while we find 
him with some ladies keeping each other awake "from 
spite," as though not to sleep in church were an obvious 
hardship ; and yet later he calmly passes the time of 
service, looking about him, with a perspective glass, on 
all the pretty women. His favorite ejaculation, "Lord!" 
occurs but once that I have observed in 1660, never in 
'61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after 
which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, 
with here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a 
whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled 
with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a marriage, 
are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord 
Brouncker's mistress, who was not even, by his own ac- 
count, the most discreet of mistresses. Tag, rag, and 
bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking, become his nat- 
ural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring 
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man 
grew so involved with Saturnalian manners and compan- 
ions that he was shot almost unconsciously into the grand 
domestic crash of 1668. 

That was the legitimate issue and punishment of 
years of staggering walk and conversation. The man 
who has smoked his pipe for half a century in a powder 



SAMUEL PEPYS 193 

magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim 
of a hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded 
Pepys and his peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still 
trips dexterously enough among the dangers of a double- 
faced career, thinking no great evil, humming to him- 
self the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that 
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with 
the consequences of his acts. For a man still, after 
so many years, the lover, although not the constant lover, 
of his wife, — for a man, besides, who was so greatly 
careful of appearances, — the revelation of his infidelities 
was a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the in- 
dignities that he endured, are not to be measured. A 
vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs. Pepys 
spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent, 
threatening him with the tongs ; she was careless of his 
honor, driving him to insult the mistress whom she had 
driven him to betray and to discard; worst of all, she 
was hopelessly inconsequent, in word and thought and 
deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and anon 
flaming forth again with the original anger. Pepys had 
not used his wife well; he had wearied her with jeal- 
ousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged 
her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon him- 
self; he had abused her in words; he had bent his fist 
at her in anger; he had once blacked her eye; and it is 
one of the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of his, 
that, while the injury is referred to once in passing, 
there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of the 
blow. But now, when he is in the wrong, nothing can 
exceed the long-suffering affection of this impatient hus- 
band. While he was still sinning and still undiscovered, 
he seems not to have known a touch of penitence 
stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to 
the theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress, 



194 SAMUEL PEPYS 

by way of compensation. Once found out, however, and 
he seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent 
usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of his ex- 
ternality. His wife may do what she pleases, and 
though he may groan, it will never occur to him to 
blame her; he has no weapon left but tears and the 
most 'abject submission. We should perhaps have re- 
spected him more had he not given way so utterly — 
above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dic- 
tation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, 
Miss Willet; but somehow I believe we like him better 
as he was. 

The death of his wife, following so shortly after, 
must have stamped the impression of this episode upon 
his mind. For the remaining years of his long life we 
have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how 
little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his corre- 
spondence; but what with the recollection of the catas- 
trophe of his married life, what with the natural in- 
fluence of his advancing years and reputation, it seems 
not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end 
for Pepys ; and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at 
last to an honored and agreeable old age among his books 
and music, the correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, and, 
in one instance at least, the poetical counsellor of Dry- 
den. Through all this period, that Diary which con- 
tained the secret memoirs of his life, with all its incon- 
sistencies and escapades, had been religiously preserved; 
nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have pro- 
vided for its destruction. So we may conceive him faith- 
ful to the end to all his dear and early memories; still 
mindful of Mrs. Hely in the woods at Epsom; still 
lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness to the dead; 
still, if he heard again that air that once so much dis- 
turbed him, thrilling at the recollection of the love that 
bound him to his wife. 



/ 



TALK AND TALKERS 

(1882) 

"Sir, we had a good talk." — Johnson. 

"As we must account for every idle word, so we must for 
every idle silence." — Franklin. 



There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in 
talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome; to 
have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every 
subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among 
our intimates, but bear our part in that great interna- 
tional congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are 
first declared, public errors first corrected, and the 
course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little 
nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parlia- 
ment but it has been long ago prepared by the grand 
jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been 
largely composed by their assistance. Literature in 
many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good 
talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in 
life, freedom, and effect. There are always two to a 
talk, giving and taking, comparing experience, and ac- 
cording conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually 
"in further search and progress"; while written words 
remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found 
wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error 
in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while liter- 
ature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a 
fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may 
call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing 

195 



196 TALK AND TALKERS 

immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, 
become merely aesthetic or merely classical like liter- 
ature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dis- 
solved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the 
contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, 
cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And 
it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and our- 
selves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; 
that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which 
is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the 
most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; 
it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and 
fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age 
and in almost any state of health. 

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations 
are still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego 
all that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face 
some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether 
in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power 
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleas- 
ures. Men and women contend for each other in the 
lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit 
decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and 
the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All 
sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, 
solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between 
human beings is founded in or heightened by some ele- 
ment of competition. Now, the relation that has the 
least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of 
friendship ; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk 
most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, 
both the scene and instrument of friendship. It is in 
talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and 
enjoy that amicable counter-assertion of personality 
which is the gauge of relations and the sport of life. 



I 



TALK AND TALKERS 197 

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Hu- 
mors must first be accorded in a kind of overture or 
prologue; hour_, company, and circumstance be suited; 
and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of 
two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the 
wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's 
pride, though he has all and more than all his ardor. 
The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation 
as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dally- 
ing where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to 
hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, con- 
tinual pleasure, and those changing prospects of the 
truth that are the best of education. There is nothing 
in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an 
idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. In- 
deed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are 
truly talkable, more than the half of them may be re- 
duced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that 
there are other people dimly understood to be not 
quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, 
it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The 
theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instru- 
ment; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain 
for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new- 
minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of his 
adversary. All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; 
and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the 
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we 
venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so 
warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's 
eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once 
launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary 
selves, tower up to the height of their secret preten- 
sions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, 
pious, musical, and wise, that in their most shining mo- 



198 TALK AND TALKERS 

ments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves 
with wbrds and for awhile inhabit a palace of delights, 
temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of 
the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting 
in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his 
way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trail- 
ing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of 
his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. 
I remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon perform- 
ance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green, 
gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and 
smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to 
sit there and evaporate The Flying Dutchman (for it 
was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful sense of 
life, warmth, well-being, and pride; and the noises of 
the city, voices, bells, and marching feet fell together 
in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the same 
way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long 
while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, 
the brain still simmering and the physical earth swim- 
ming around you with the colors of the sunset. 

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large 
surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological 
strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross- 
lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam 
and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the 
matter in hand from every point of the compass, and 
from every degree of mental elevation and abasement — ■ 
these are the material with which talk is fortified, the 
food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is 
proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. 
Talk should proceed by instances ; by the apposite, not 
the expository. It should keep close along the lines 
of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, 
at the level where history, fiction, and experience in- 



TALK AND TALKERS 199 

tersect and illuminate each other. I am I^ and You 
are You, with all my heart; but conceive how these lean 
propositions change and brighten when, instead of 
words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit 
housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering 
voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less 
surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of 
generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and all the 
characters of Theophrastus — and call up other men, 
by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; 
or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other 
famous names, still glowing with the hues of life. Com- 
munication is no longer by words, but by the instancing 
of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and 
epochs of history_, in bulk. That which is understood 
excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike ; 
ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we 
may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without 
effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers 
who have a large common ground of reading will, for 
this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine 
converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Con- 
suelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steen- 
son, they can leave generalities and begin at once to 
speak by figures. 

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most 
frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts. 
A few pleasures bear discussion for their own sake, but 
only those which are most social or most radically hu- 
man; and even these can only be discussed among their 
devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the ex- 
pert, whether in athletics, art, or law; I have heard the 
best kind of talk on technicalities from such rare and 
happy persons as both know and love their business. 
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 



200 TALK AND TALKERS 

minutes at a time^ which makes me suspect we hear too 
much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as 
the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And 
yet the weather^ the dramatic element in scenery, is 
far more tractable in language, and far more human both 
in import and suggestion than the stable features of the 
landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people gen- 
erally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is 
often excitingly presented in literature. But the ten- 
dency of all living talk draws it back and back into the 
common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of the 
street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last 
resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the 
heroic form of gossip ; heroic in virtue of its high pre- 
tensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personali- 
ties. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, 
off moral or theological discussion. These are to all 
the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's 
technicalities ; the medium through which all consider 
life, and the dialect in which they express their judg- 
ments. I knew three young men who walked together 
daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful 
forest and in cloudless summer weather; daily they 
talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered that 
whole time beyond two subjects — theology and love. 
And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of 
divines would have granted their premises or welcomed 
their conclusions. 

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk 
any more than by private thinking. That is not the 
profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above all in 
the experience; for when we reason at large on any 
subject, we review our state and history in life. 
From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in 
talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like war,^ 



TALK AND TALKERS 201 

widening the boundaries of knowledge like an explora- 
tion. A point arises ; the question takes a problematical, 
a baffling, yet a likely air ; the talkers begin to feel lively 
presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; toward 
this they strive with emulous ardor, each by his own 
path, and straggling for first utterance; and then one 
leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and 
almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and 
behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is 
illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and 
unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery 
is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life 
of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are 
neither few nor far apart; they are attained with speed 
and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the nature 
of the process, they are always worthily shared. 

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and 
deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, 
which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not 
eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain pro- 
portion of all of these that I love to encounter in my 
amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding 
doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of 
truths. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but 
fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on 
equal terms. We must reach some solution, some 
shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk be- 
comes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, 
or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein 
pleasure lies. 

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall 
call Spring-Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never 
knew any one who mingled so largely the possible in- 
gredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the 
fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a mad- 



202 TALK AND TALKERS 

man to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which 
is more remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclu- 
sions_, the humorous eloquence of his language_, or his 
power of method, bringing the whole of life into the 
focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational 
salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the ser- 
pent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleido- 
scope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, 
and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady 
rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them 
empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant con- 
juror. It is my common practice when a piece of con- 
duct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack 
with such grossness, such partiality, and such wearing 
iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. 
In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required char- 
acter, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act 
in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the 
vim of these impersonations, the strange scale of lan- 
guage, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from 
Kant to Major Dyngwell — 

"As fast as a musician scatters sounds 
Out of an instrument — " 

the sudden, sweeping generalizations, the absurd irrel- 
evant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humor, elo- 
quence, and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet 
all luminous in the admired disorder of their combina- 
tion. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging 
to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of a great 
presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the 
impression of a grosser mass of character than most 
men. It has been said of him that his presence could 
be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same. 



TALK AND TALKERS 203 

I think, has been said o£ other powerful constitutions 
condemned to much physical inaction. There is some- 
thing boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk 
which suits well enough with this impression. He will 
roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he 
will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and mean- 
while his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and 
receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and 
the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a cer- 
tain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agree- 
ment issue, and you end arra-in-arm, and in a glow of 
mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make 
your final union the more unexpected and precious. 
Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect in- 
telligence, a desire to hear although not always to lis- 
ten, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. 
You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend 
debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any mo- 
ment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, 
create for you a view you never held, and then furiously 
fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my 
two favorites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant 
talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same 
category; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, 
fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, 
in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and 
give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of 
battle. Both these men can be beat from a position, 
but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard adven- 
ture, worth attempting. With both you can pass days 
in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, 
scenery, and manners of its own; live a life apart, more 
arduous, active, and glowing than any real existence; 
and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a 
theatre, or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing 



204< TALK AND TALKERS 

and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still 
around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the 
far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, 
Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one 
glances high like a meteor and makes a light in dark- 
ness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns 
at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the 
same humor and artistic interests, the same unquenched 
ardor in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunder- 
claps of contradiction. 

Cockshot* is a different article, but vastly entertain- 
ing, and has been meat and drink to me for many a 
long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, and pertina- 
cious, and the choice of words not much. The point about 
him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can 
propound nothing but he lias either a theorj^ about it 
ready-made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, 
and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in your 
presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a 
moment. I should have some theory for that." A 
blither spectacle than the vigor with which he sets about 
the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a 
demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, 
and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, 
with a visible and lively effort. He has, in theorizing, a 
compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic gusto; 
something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the 
fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is 
he, to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But 
some of them are right enough, durable even for life; 
and the poorest serve for a cock-shy — as when idle peo- 
ple, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an 
hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, seri- 
ous opinions or humors of the moment, he still defends 
* The late Fleeming Jenkin. 



TALK AND TALKERS 205 

his ventures with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting 
savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. 
He knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, 
for the sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to 
use the old slang, like a thorough "glutton," and hon- 
estly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. Cock- 
shot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. 
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk 
is like the driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. 
Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the quali- 
ties by which he lives. Athelred, on the other hand, pre- 
sents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat 
slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man 
I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him 
sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute 
or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. 
And there is something singularly engaging, often in- 
structive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes 
the process as well as the result, the works as well as 
the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of in- 
spiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, 
coming from deeper down, they smack the more per- 
sonally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, 
rich in sediment and humor. There are sayings of his 
in which he has stamped himself into the very grain 
of the language ; you would think he must have worn the 
words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not 
as a sayer of particular good things that Athelred is 
most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of 
thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, 
while he has been wielding the broad-ax ; and between 
us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has 
fallen. I have known him to battle the same question 
night after night for years, keeping it in the reign of 
talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life 



206 TALK AND TALKERS 

with humorous or grave intention, and all the while, 
never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an unfair ad- 
vantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment, when 
arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radi- 
antly just to those from whom he differs; but then 
the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while 
Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to con- 
demn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating 
but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with 
his doubts. 

Both the last talkers deal much in points of con- 
duct and religion studied in the "dry light" of prose. 
Indirectly and as if against his will the same elements 
from time to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk 
of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge, com- 
plete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, dis- 
criminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best 
of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with 
me — proxime accessit, I should say. He sings the 
praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, 
wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as 
to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue 
like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the 
upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the 
Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. 
Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Hora- 
tian humors. His mirth has something of the tragedy 
of the world for its perpetual background ; and he feasts 
like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly 
sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the 
distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or 
with himself; and this instant war in his members some- 
times divides the man's attention. He does not always, 
perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in con- 
versation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than 



TALK AND TALKERS 207 

those which he expresses; you are conscious that he 
keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake 
off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise oc- 
casional disappointments ; even an occasional unfair- 
ness for his companions, who find themselves one day 
giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out 
of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another 
class from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, 
but appears in conversation, as occasion rises, in two 
distinct characters, one of which I admire and fear, and 
the other love. In the first, he is radiantly civil and 
rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, and from 
that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favors. 
He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he 
wears no sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls 
in a crystal of wit, so polished that the dull do not per- 
ceive it, but so right that tlie sensitive are silenced. 
True talk should have more body and blood, should be 
louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the 
true talker should not hold so steady an advantage over 
whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a 
score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, 
when he unbends into a strain of graceful gossip, sing- 
ing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an 
elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. 
I know another person who attains, in his moments, to 
the insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I de- 
clare, as Congreve wrote ; but that is a sport of nature, 
and scarce falls under the rubric, for there is none, 
alas ! to give him answer. 

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine 
conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with 
their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. 
To have their proper weight they should appear in a 
biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good 



208 TALK AND TALKERS 

talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of act- 
ing where each should represent himself to the greatest 
advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where eacli 
speaker is most full}^ and candidly himself_, and where, 
if you were to shift the speeches round from one to 
another, there would be the greatest loss in significance 
and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk de- 
pends so wholly on our company. We should like to 
introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir 
Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even 
painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, 
can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that 
strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only 
with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded 
as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is 
a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have 
it, and to be grateful for forever. 

II* 

Ix the last paper there was perhaps too much about 
mere debate; and there was nothing said at all about 
that kind of talk which is merely luminous and restful, 
a higher power of silence, the quiet of the evening 
shared by ruminating friends. There is something, 
aside from personal preference, to be alleged in sup- 
port of this omission. Those who are no chimney- 
cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have 
a ground in reason for their choice. They get little 
rest indeed; but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the 
V virtues are all active, life is alert, and it is in repose 
that men prepare themselves for evil. On the other 
hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves 

* This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in The 
Snectator. 



TALK AND TALKERS 209 

and others; they have in a high degree the fencer's 
pleasure in dexterity displayed and proved; what they 
get they get upon life's terms^ paying for it as they 
go; and once the talk is launched_, they are assured of 
honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. 
The aboriginal man within us_, the cave-dweller, still 
lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and 
berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; it 
is like his old primeval days upon the crags, a return 
to the sincerity of savage life from the comfortable 
fictions of the civilized. And if it be delightful to the 
Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger 
brother, the conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite 
sure of your urbane and smiling coteries; I fear they 
indulge a man's vanities in silence, suffer him to en- 
croach, encourage him on to be an ass, and send him 
forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but 
radically more contemptible than when he entered. But 
if I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, 
bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure to have its 
ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. 
He will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear 
to demonstrate my folly to my face. 

For many natures there is not much charm in the 
still, chambered society, the circle of bland countenances, 
the digestive silence, the admired remark, the flutter 
of affectionate approval. They demand more atmos- 
phere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our 
pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well 
breathed in an uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that 
the choice, given their character and faults, is one to 
be defended. The purely wise are silenced by facts ; they 
talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around them 
like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be 
somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a 



210 TALK AND TALKERS 

thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. They 
stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance re- 
minds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so 
\with all. Others in conversation seek rather contact 
ywith their fellow-men than increase of knowledge or 
'clarity of thought. The drama, not the philosophy, of 
life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even 
when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible 
of what we may call human scenery along the road 
they follow. They dwell in the heart of life; the blood 
sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what 
delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them 
blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, liv- 
ing, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this 
description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and 
ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed counte- 
nance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience 
obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge 
wliich no syllogism would have conveyed to him. His 
own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively con- 
scious of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to 
hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will 
lose his hold on the soberness of things and take himself 
in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such a one the 
very way of moral ruin; the school where he might 
learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous. 

This character is perhaps commoner than philos- 
ophers suppose. And for persons of that stamp to learn 
much by conversation, they must speak with their supe- 
riors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that must 
be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend 
to bully them for their good, they must find either an 
old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the 
artificial order of society, that courtesy may be particu- 
larly exercised. 



TALK AND TALKERS 211 

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our 
mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our 
obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, 
on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect 
and pity. A flavor of the old school, a touch of some- 
thing different in their manner — which is freer and 
rounder, if they come of what is called a good family, 
and often more timid and precise if they are of the mid- 
dle class — serves, in these days, to accentuate the dif- 
ference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But 
their superiority is founded more deeply than by out- 
ward marks or gestures. They are before us in the 
march of man; they have more or less solved the irking 
problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; 
in good and evil they have held their course; and now, 
without open shame, they near the crown and harbor. 
It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's 
darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit 
tossed. Yet long before we were so much as thought 
upon, the like calamity befell the old man or woman 
that now, with pleasant humor, rallies us upon our in- 
attention, sitting composed in the holy evening of man's 
life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed 
of our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous 
roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, un- 
der the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the 
mere presence of contented elders, look forward and 
take patience. Fear shrinks before them "like a thing 
reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, 
but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities 
and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; 
they report lions in the path ; they counsel a meticulous 
footing; but their serene, marred faces are more elo- 
quent and tell another story. Where they have gone, 
we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they 



212 TALK AND TALKERS 

have endured unbroken^ we also^ God helping us, will 
make a shift to bear. 

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial^ 
but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's sim- 
ples, plain considerations overlooked by youth. They 
have matters to communicate, be they never so stupid. 
Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; 
classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, 
like a book of travel, with things we should not other- 
wise have learned. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's 
detachment, — and this is why, of two old men, the one 
who is not your father speaks to you with the more sen- 
sible authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest 
have lively interests and remain still young. Thus I 
have known two young men great friends ; each swore 
by the other's father; the father of each swore by the 
other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were 
perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like 
the germ of some kindly comedy. 

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the 
critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last 
is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more in- 
structive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits 
handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, 
scanning experience with reverted eye ; and chirping and 
smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the les- 
son of his long career. Opinions are strengthened, in- 
deed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. 
What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired 
veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his con- 
tent, what still quickens his old honest heart — these are 
"the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to 
prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they 
differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple 
finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-bearded 



TALK AND TALKERS 213 

teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have known 
one old gentleman^ whom I may name, for he is now 
gathered to his stock — Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dun- 
barton, and author of an excellent law-book still re- 
edited and republished. Whether he was originally big 
or little is more than I can guess. When I knew him 
he was all fallen away and fallen in ; crooked and 
shrunken ; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support ; 
troubled by ailments, which kept him hobbling in and 
out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not 
for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under 
his chin — and for that he never failed to apologize, for 
it went sore against the traditions of his life. You can 
imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; 
yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year 
in the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming 
with human kindness, and stanch as a Roman soldier 
under his manifold infirmities. You could not say that 
he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shake- 
speare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by 
the page together ; but the parchment was filled up, there 
was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he was capable 
of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits. 
His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride 
in using it. On his last voyage as Commissioner of 
Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made himself 
clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet, ruffling the 
while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a 
habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, 
which was puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill 
with his appearance, and seemed a survival from some 
former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was 
a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may 
have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to 
the bench. His humor was perfectly equable, set beyond 



214 TALK AND TALKERS 

the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone, and gravel 
might have combined their forces against that frail 
tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, 
he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ and 
greet me with the same open brow, the same kind for- 
mality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated 
the man almost to a decade. He had begun, life, under 
his mother's influence, as an admirer of Junius, but on 
maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to 
Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be 
punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I 
was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, 
and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should cer- 
tainly be shamed : the remark was apposite, I suppose, in 
the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he 
had known the author — known him, too, for a Tory; and 
to the genuine classic a contemporary is always some- 
thing of a trouble. He had the old, serious love of the 
play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a cer- 
tain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for 
he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edin- 
burgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's 
fairy pieces with great scenic display. A moderate in 
religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life 
by a conversation with two young lads, revivalists. 
"H'm," he would say — "new to me. I have had — h'm— 
no such experience." It struck him, not with pain, 
rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a 
Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a stand- 
ing, should hear these young fellows talking of his own 
subject, his own weapons that he had fought the battle 
of life with, — "and — h'm — not understand." In this 
Avise and graceful attitude he did justice to himself and 
others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and recog- 
nized their limits without anger or alarm. His last 



TALK AND TALKERS 215 

recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after 
he had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister 
and was interrupted by an intolerable pang. "After 
all/' he said, "of all the 'isms, I know none so bad as 
rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time 
before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been 
on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a cliief part of 
his existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on 
which he ever soiled his lips with slang — a thing he 
loathed. We were both Roberts; and as we took our 
places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We 
are just what you would call two bob." He offered me 
port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of 
"twenty-shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was 
full of old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an an- 
cient boy on a holiday. But what I recall chiefly was his 
confession that he had never read Othello to an end. 
Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved nothing 
better than to display his knowledge and memory by 
adducing parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages 
where the same word was employed, or the same idea 
differently treated. But Othello had beaten him. "That 
noble gentleman and that noble lady — h'm — too painful 
for me." The same night the hoardings were covered 
with posters, "Burlesque of Othello " and the contrast 
blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable 
look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His ac- 
quaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. 
All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room 
beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good ad- 
vice; he was himself the instance that pointed and 
adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have 
found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, 
discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a lif*" 
so honest and composed ; a soul like an ancient violin, so 



216 TALK AND TALKERS 

subdued to harmony _, responding to a touch in music — 
as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the 
eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless 
and gentle. 

The second class of old people are not anecdotic ; they 
are rather hearers than talkers, listening to the young 
with an amused and critical attention. To have this sort 
of intercourse to perfection, I think we must go to old 
ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin 
with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the 
tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we 
will take more from a woman than even from the oldest 
man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is 
the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this 
business. The old lady that I have in my eye is a very 
caustic speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in 
absolute command, whether for silence or attack. If 
she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse 
the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even 
slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laugh- 
ing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, 
as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It 
requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground 
of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the cox- 
combs of the young, * The pill is disguised in sugar of 
wit; it is administered as a compliment — if you had not 
J pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a per- 
\ sonal affair — a hyphen, a tra\t d'union, between you 
' and your censor; age's philandering, for her pleasure 
and your good, f Incontestably the young man feels very 
much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick 
with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still 
smile. The correction of silence is what kills; when 
you know you have transgressed, and your friend says 
nothing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of 



TALK AND TALKERS 217 

gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. 
But when the word is out_, the worst is over; and a fel- 
low with any good humor at all may pass through a 
perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his 
soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reap- 
pear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reac- 
tion, and ready_, with a shrinking readiness, one-third 
loath, for a repetition of the discipline. 

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, 
and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a 
man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. 
Still there are some — and I doubt if there be any man 
who can return the compliment. The class of man repre- 
sented by Vernon Whitford in The Egoist says, indeed, 
the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a 
noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and in- 
structive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the 
conduct of a man of honor; but we agree with him, 
against our consciences, when he remorsefully considers 
"its astonishing dryness," He is the best pf men, but 
the best of women manage to combine all that and some- 
thing more, h. Their very faults assist them ; they are 
helped even by the falseness of their position in life. 
They can retire into the fortified camp of the properties. 
They can touch a subject and suppress it. f The most 
adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means 
to be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake 
hands 4^ But a man has the full responsibility of his free- 
dom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent with- 
out rudeness, must answer for his words upon the mo- 
ment, and is not seldom left face to face with a damning 
choice, between the more or less dishonorable wriggling 
of Deronda and the down-right woodenness of Vernon 
Whitford. 

But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; 



218 TALK AND TALKERS 

they do not sit throned on infirmities like the old; they 
are suitors as well as sovereigns ; their vanity is engaged, 
their affections are too apt to follow; and hence much 
of the talk between the sexes degenerates into something 
unworthy of the name. The desire to please_, to shine 
with a certain softness of lustre and to draw a fasci- 
nating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation 
all that is sterling and most of what is humorous. As 
soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to 
flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the 
intellectual, and the commerce of words, consciously or 
not, becomes secondary to the commercing of eyes. But 
even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a man 
and a woman converse equally and honestly, something 
in their nature or their education falsifies the strain. An 
instinct prompts them to agree ; and where that is im- 
possible, to agree to differ. Should they neglect the 
warning, at the' first suspicion of an argument, they find 
themselves in different hemispheres. About any point 
of business or conduct, any actual affair demanding set- 
tlement, a woman will speak and listen, hear and answer 
arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with can- 
dor and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate 
be something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for 
talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater in- 
stantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce 
facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail 
him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless 
she has forgotten it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, 
at the very junctures when a talk between men grows 
brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear 
fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolu- 
tion. The point of difference, the point of interest, is 
evaded by the brilliant woman, under a shower of ir- 
relevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the dis- 



TALK AND TALKERS 219 

creet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly 
forward to the nearest point of safety. And this sort 
of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of 
sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an al- 
tered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true drawing- 
room queens. 

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is 
so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of 
women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, 
and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; 
their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and 
self-importance; their managing arts — the arts of a 
civilized slave among good-natured barbarians — are all 
painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations. It 
is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene 
that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly 
compared. In the garden, on the road or the hillside, or 
tete-a-tete and apart from interruptions, occasions arise 
when we may learn much from any single woman; and 
nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage i^ 
one long conversation, checkered by disputes. The dis 
putes are valueless ; they but ingrain the difference ; 
the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail 
her colors to the mast. But in the intervals, almost un- 
consciously and with no desire to shine, the whole mate- 
rial of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck out 
and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their 
notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, 
without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into 
new worlds of thought. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

(1882) 

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, 
the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; 
we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of our- 
selves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with 
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable 
of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book 
be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like 
the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, re- 
peat itself in a thousand colored pictures to the eye. It 
was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and 
loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period 
of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and con- 
versation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug 
blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for 
truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an 
old wayside inn where, "toward the close of the year 
17 — ," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were play- 
ing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar 
coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and 
a scowling fellow of herculean proportions striding 
along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was 
further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to 
travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than 
the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and 
I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the high- 
wayman was my favorite dish. I can still hear that 
merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night 
and the coming of the day are still related in my mind 
with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and 

220 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 221 

the words "postchaise," the "great North road," 
"ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. 
One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, 
we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or 
character or thought, but for some quality of the brute 
incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or won-^ 
der. Although each of these was welcome in its place, 
the charm for the sake of which we read depended on 
something different from either. My elders used to 
read novels aloud; and I can still remember four dif- 
ferent passages which I heard, before I was ten, with 
the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered 
long afterward to be the admirable opening of What 
Will He Do with It : it was no wonder I was pleased with 
that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is 
a little vague ; it was about a dark, tall house at night, 
and people groping on the stairs by the light that es- 
caped from the open door of a sick-room. In another, a 
lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, 
whence he could watch the lighted windows and the 
figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most 
sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for 
a child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last, 
a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, 
walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night 
and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.* Different as 
they are, all these early favorites have a common note — 
they have all a touch of the romantic. 

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry 
of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of 
two sorts — the active and the passive. Now we are 
conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon 
we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking 

* Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery 
of Charles Kingsley. 



222 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now 
we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by 
our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of 
these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the 
latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three 
parts of life, they say; but I think they put it high. 
There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not 
immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not re- 
gard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious 
and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not 
upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he man- 
ages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations 
of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and 
of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, 
the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such 
material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the 
serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a 
standing proof of the dissemination of the human con- 
science. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, 
the most joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, 
and buoyant tales. 

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness 
in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbor 
puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests 
work, another idleness, a third early rising and long 
rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing 
water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of 
the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anony- 
mous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should 
happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of 
it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us 
in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and 
moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low 
rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly tor- 
ture and delight me. Something must have happened 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 223 

in such places^ and perhaps ages back, to members of 
my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to in- 
vent appropriate games for tliem, as I still try, just 
as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some 
places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud 
for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; 
certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots 
again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and im- 
penetrable, "miching mallecho." The iuK at Burford 
Bridge, with its arbors and green garden and silent, 
eddying river — though it is known already as the place 
where Keats wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson 
parted from his Emma — still seems to wait the coming 
of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, 
behind these old green shutters, some further business 
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn 
at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my 
fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the 
pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine — ■ 
in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guard- 
ship swinging to her anchor ; behind, the old garden with 
the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of 
Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning 
of the Antiquary. But you need not tell me — that is 
not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet com- 
plete, which must express the meaning of that inn more 
fully. So it is with names and faces ; so it is with inci- 
dents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and 
yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, 
which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many 
of these romances have we not seen determine at their 
birth; how many people have met us with a look of 
meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial ac- 
quaintances; to how many places have we not drawn 
near, with express intimations — "here my destiny 



224 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

awaits me" — and we have but dined there and passed 
on ! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a 
perpetual flutter^ on the heels^ as it seemed, of some ad- 
venture that should justify the place; but though the 
feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at 
morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, 
nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man 
or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, 
a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught 
with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, 
on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green 
shutters of the inn at Burford.* 

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which 
any lively literature has to count. The desire for 
knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is 
not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and 
striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries 
to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses 
invention in his play ; and even as the imaginative grown 
person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with 
many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer 
shows us the realization and the apotheosis of the day- 
dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished 
with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy 
the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the 
ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing 
should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind 
of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk 
aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in 
a tale answer one to another like notes in music. The 
threads of a story come from time to time together and 
make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time 

* Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat 
with my own hands in Kidnapped. Some day, perhaps, I may 
trv a rattle at the shutters. 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 225 

to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, 
which stamps the story home like an illustration. 
Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shout- 
ing over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great 
bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these 
are each culminating moments in the legend, and eacli 
has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other 
things we may forget; we may forget the words, al- 
though they are beautiful; we may forget the author's 
comment, althougli perhaps it was ingenious and true ; 
but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark 
of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our 
capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into 
the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide 
can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the 
plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, 
or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be re- 
markably striking to the mind's eye. This is the high- 
est and hardest thing to do in words ; the thing which, 
once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and 
the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of 
epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in liter- 
ature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic,, 
are" bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in 
result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Bur- 
ford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it 
is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion 
and make a country famous with a legend. It is one 
thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting 
logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit ; 
it is quite another to give them body and blood in the 
story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but 
the second is something besides, for it is likewise art. 
English people of the present day* are apt, I know 

* 188i?. 



226 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and re- 
serve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and 
the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write 
a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull 
one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain in- 
terest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a 
sense of human kinship:: stirred ; and a kiiid of monot- 
onous fitness, comparable to the words and air of 
Sandy's Mull, preserved among the infinitesimal oc- 
currences recorded. Some people work, in this manner, 
with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable 
clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connec- 
tion. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself 
to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with 
the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnette dallying in the de- 
serted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically con- 
ceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at 
Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow were not de- 
livered, Vajiity Fair would cease to be a work of art. 
That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the 
discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward 
and consolation of the reader. The end of Esmond is 
a yet wider excursion from the author's customary 
fields ; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas ; the great 
and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the 
great, unblushing French thief; as usual, he has bor- 
rowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword 
rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, mar- 
tial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly il- 
lustrate the necessity for marking incident than to com- 
pare the living fame of Robinson Crusoe with the dis- 
credit of Clarissa Harlowe. Clarissa is a book of a 
far more startling import, worked out, on a great can- 
vas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It 
contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 227 

of spirit and insight^ letters sparkling with unstrained 
humanity; and if the death of the Iieroine be somewhat 
frigid and artificial^ the last days of the hero strike 
the only note of what we now call Byronism, between 
the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And yet a little 
story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of 
the style nor a thousandth part cfi the wisdom, exploring 
none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the 
perennial interest of love, goes on from edition to edi- 
tion, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves 
unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was 
twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, 
when he heard a chapter of Robinson read aloud in a 
farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, 
luiddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm anotlier 
man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day- 
dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be 
bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he 
sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and re- 
turned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could 
he find another copy but one that was in English. 
Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, 
and with entire delight, read Robinson. It was like 
the story of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from 
Clarissa, would he have been fired with the same chival- 
rous ardor? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every quality 
that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted — pictor- 
ial or picture-making romance. While Robinson de- 
pends, for the most part and with the overwhelming 
majority of its readers, on the charm of circumstance. 

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the 
dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic in- 
terest, rise and fall togetlier by a common and organic 
law. Situation is animated with passion, passion 
clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, 



228 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

hut each inheres indissolubly witli the other. This is 
high art; and not only the highest art possible in words, 
but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest 
mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleas- 
ure. Such are epics_, and the few prose tales that have 
the epic weight. But as from a school of works, aping 
tlie creative, incident and romance are ruthlesslv dis- 
carded, so may character and drama be omitted or sub- 
ordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, 
more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates 
in childhood, and still delights in age — I mean the 
Arabian Nights — where you sliall look in vain for 
moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or 
voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and 
genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the 
most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment 
and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps near- 
est of any modern to these Arabian authors in the 
purely material charm of some of his romances. The 
early part of Monte Crista, down to the finding of the 
treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man 
never breathed who shared these moving incidents with- 
out a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread 
and Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is one 
long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull : 
but as for these early chapters, I do not believe there 
is another volume extant where you can breathe the 
same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very 
thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but 
it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the 
other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady 
setting forth on a second or third voyage into Monte 
Crista. Here are stories which powerfully aifect the 
reader, which can be reperused at any age, and where 
the characters are no more than puppets. The bony 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 229 

fist of the showman visibly propels them; their springs 
are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies 
filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their 
adventures. And the point may be illustrated still fur- 
ther. The last interview between Lucy and Richard 
Feverel is pure drama ; more than that, it is the strong- 
est scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. 
Their first meeting by the river, on the* other hand, is 
pure romance; it has nothing to do with character; it 
might happen to any other boy and maiden, and be 
none the less delightful for the change. And yet I 
think he would be a bold man wlio sliould choose be- 
tween these passages. Thus, in the same book, we may 
have two scenes, each capital in its order: in the one, 
human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its 
genuine voice ; in the second, according circumstances, 
like instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but de- 
sirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for our- 
selves ; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may 
hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may 
ask more genius — I do not say it does ; but at least the 
other dwells as clearly in the memory. 

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all 
things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the 
ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. 
Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic: both 
qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. 
Nor does romance depend upon the material impor- 
tance of the incidents. , To deal with strong and deadly 
elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to con- 
jure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to 
double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Con- 
suelo at the Canon's villa is a very trifling incident; yet 
we may read a dozen boisterous stories from beginning 
to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an im- 



230 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

pression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at 
the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my 
blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. Every single 
article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy 
forever" to the man who reads of them. They are the 
things that should be found, and the bare enumeration 
stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest 
the other day in a new book, The Sailor's Sweetheart, 
by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig 
Morning Star is very rightly felt and spiritedly writ- 
ten; but the clotlies, the books and the money satisfy 
the reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing 
here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of 
treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made 
dull. There are few people who have not groaned 
under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the 
Swiss Fainily Robinson, that dreary family. They 
found article after article, creature after creature, from 
milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; 
but no informing taste had presided over the selection, 
there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these 
riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne's 
Mysterious Island is another case in point; there was 
no gusto and no glamor about that; it might have come 
from a shop. But the two hundred and seventy-eight 
Australian sovereigns on board the Morning Star fell 
upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole 
vistas of secondary stories, besides the one in hand, 
radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from 
a striking particular in life; and I was made for the 
moment as happy as a reader has the right to be. 

To come at all at the nature of this quality of ro- 
mance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our at- 
titude to any art. No art produces illusion; in the 
theatre we never forget that we are in tlie theatre; 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 231 

and while we read a story, we sit wavering between two 
minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of 
the performance, now condescending to take an active 
part in fancy with the characters. This last is the 
triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader con- 
sciously plays at being the hero_, the scene is a good 
scene. Now, in character-studies the pleasure that we 
take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at in- 
congruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy 
with courage, suffering, or virtue. But the characters 
are still themselves, they are not us ; the more clearly 
they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away 
from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back 
into our place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself 
with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, 
for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. 
It is not character but incident that woos us out of our 
reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it 
happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long 
dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with en- 
ticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the 
cliaracters ; then we push the hero aside ; then we plunge 
into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh ex- 
perience ; and then, and then only, do we say we have 
been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable 
things that we imagine in our day-dreams ; there are 
lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the 
idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it 
would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, ot calumniated. 
It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic 
import, in which every incident, detail, and trick of cir- 
cumstance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. 
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; 
it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of 
his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy 



232 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

that he can join in it with all his heart, w}i;;n it pleases 
him with every turn^ when he" loves to recall it and 
dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction 
is called romance. 

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the roman- 
tics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable claim 
to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirabil- 
ity of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would 
make up for himself, walking, in the best health and 
temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence 
it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these 
slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains 
with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book 
aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to 
the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of 
that beautiful name, The Lady of the" Lake, or that di- 
rect, romantic opening, — one of the most spirited and 
poetical in literature, — "The stag at eve had drunk his 
fill." The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn 
and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged 
book. The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast up by 
the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness — 
moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish 
words on his tongue, among the simple islanders — 
singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland 
mistress — is conceived in the very highest manner of 
romantic invention. The words of his song, "Through 
groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a 
lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast 
upon which the tale is built. In Guy Mannering, again, 
every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the 
scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a 
model instance of romantic method. 

" *I remember the tune well,' he says, 'though I can- 
not guess what should at present so strongly recall it 



A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 233 

to my memory/ He took his flageolet from his pocket 
and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune 
awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel. . . . 
She immediately took up the song — 

" 'Are these the links of Forth, she said ; 
Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head 
That I so fain would see?' 

" *By heaven !' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.' " 
On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, 
as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this 
famous touch of the flageolet and the old song is se- 
lected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's 
idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden 
leg, were something strange to have expounded. As 
a matter of personal experience, Meg's appearance to 
old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, 
the scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition 
of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to 
ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The 
second point is still more curious. The reader will ob- 
serve a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by 
me. Well, here is how it runs in the original: "A damsel 
who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down 
the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with 
water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who 
gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff 
of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the 
reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has for- 
gotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin ; 
and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying 
back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail fore- 
most, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely 
bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad nar- 
rative besides. 



234 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one 
that throws a strong light upon the subject of this 
paper. For here we have a man of the finest creative 
instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the 
romantic junctures of his story; and we find him utterly 
careless, almost^ it would seem, incapable, in the tech- 
nical matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but 
frequently wrong in points of drama. In character 
parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was 
delicate, strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated 
features of too many of his heroes have already wearied 
two generations of readers. At times his characters will 
speak with something far beyond propriety with a true 
heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading 
wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic 
rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and 
write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as 
Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splen- 
did romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, 
then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, in- 
articulate twaddle? 

It seems to me that the explanation is to be found 
in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his 
books are play to the reader, so were they play to him. 
He conjured up the romantic with delight^ but he had 
hardly patience to describe it. He was a great day- 
dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous vis- 
ions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful 
sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he 
pleases us. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; 
but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew 
less. A great romantic — an idle child. 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

(1883) 

The civilization, the manners, and the morals of dog- 
kind are to a great extent subordinated to those of his 
ancestral master, man. This animal, in many ways so 
superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares 
the domestic life, and humors the caprices of the tyrant. 
But the potentate, like the British in India, pays small 
regard to the character of his willing client, judges him 
with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword. 
Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have 
exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul 
below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, 
more unintelligent has been the attitude of his express 
detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in 
their proper place" ; who say "poo' fellow, poo' fellow/* 
and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of 
the vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed 
to admire "the creature's instinct"; and flying far be- 
yond folly, have dared to resuscitate the theory of ani- 
mal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the "automaton- 
dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like 
strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; 
a machine working independently of his control, the 
heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and 
the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret, 
enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the 
thunder of the stones; an automaton in one corner of 
which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man. 

235 



236 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited apti- 
tudes are his_, inherited frailties. Some things he at 
once views and understands_, as though he were 
awakened from a sleep^ as though he came "trailing 
clouds of glory," But with him, as with man, the field 
of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and oc- 
casional; and about the far larger part of life both the 
dog and his master must conduct their steps by de- 
duction and observation. 

The leading distinction between dog and man, after 
and perhaps before the different duration of their lives, 
is that the one can speak and that the other cannot. 
The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in 
the development of his intellect. It hinders him from 
many speculations, for words are the beginning of 
metaphysic. At the same blow it saves him from many 
superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher 
name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults 
of the dog are many. He is vainer than man^ singularly 
greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, sus- 
picious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, 
and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent 
small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious 
communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies 
with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw ; and when 
he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose 
is other than appears. But he has some apology to of- 
fer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his 
dialect have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly 
understood both by his master and himself; yet when a 
new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of 
meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose ; and 
this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen 
his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the 
dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 237 

human nicety, the distinction between formal and es- 
sential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate 
dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has 
told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon 
his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly 
feeling theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The 
canine, like tlie human, gentleman demands in his mis- 
demeanors Montaigne's *'je tie sais quoi de genereux." 
He is never more than half ashamed of having barked 
or bitten; and for those faults into which he has been 
led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he 
retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. 
But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly 
uncurls his fleece. 

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name 
for truth, the dog has been credited with modesty. It 
is amazing how the use of language blunts the faculties 
of man — that because vainglory finds no vent in words, 
creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect 
a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog 
were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would 
prate interminably, and still about himself; when we 
had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a gar- 
ret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible 
for falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far 
to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to 
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a 
manlier sense of their own merits ; and the parallel, be- 
sides, is ready. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold 
him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe 
with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along 
the street for shadows of offence — here was the talk- 
ing dog. 

It is just this rage for consideration that has be- 
trayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend 



238 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, pre- 
serves his independence. But the dog, with one eye 
ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, 
and praised and patted into the renunciation of his 
nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's 
plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he 
was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom 
we keep working, the whole race grew more and more 
self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The number 
of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely 
small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under 
material cares, he is far more theatrical than average 
man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any pretension 
to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot 
pursuit of admiration. Take out your puppy for a 
walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, 
stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a few months 
pass, and when you repeat the process you will find 
nature buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly ; 
but the simplest processes of our material life will all 
be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious 
etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has awakened. But 
it is not so. Some dogs — some, at the very least — if 
they be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; 
and these, when at length they meet with a companion 
of experience, and have the game explained to them, 
distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion 
to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which 
would radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, 
have an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their 
bond of sympathy that both are the children of conven- 
tion. 

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is 
eternally condemned to some degree of humbug; the 
sense of the law in their members fatally precipitates 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 239 

either toward a frozen and affected bearing. And the 
converse is true ; and in the elaborate and conscious man- 
ners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal 
stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street 
some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson 
in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; 
in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined 
conception; and tlie dullest cur, beholding him, pricks 
up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that 
charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high- 
minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn 
pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so 
much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in re- 
pose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic 
means to wholly represent the part. And it is more 
pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the 
small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to 
outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is 
feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the 
whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the 
one hand; an the other> their singular difference of size 
and strength among themselves effectually prevents the 
appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more 
exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle 
presented by a school — ushers, monitors, and big and 
little boys — qualified by one circumstance, the introduc- 
tion of the other sex. In each, we should observe a some- 
what similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar 
points of honor. In each the larger animal keeps a con- 
temptuous good-humor; in each the smaller annoys him 
with wasp-like impudence, certain of practical im- 
munity; in each we shall find a double life producing 
double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism 
combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I 
have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, 



240 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

set aside the fur^ could hardly have been told apart; 
and if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we 
must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where 
the dogs are trooping. 

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. 
Incessant massacre of female innocents has changed the 
proportions of the sexes and perverted their relations. 
Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see 
a romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as 
delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions. 
Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is 
yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes 
of Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created 
an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In 
that society they reign without a rival : conscious queens ; 
and in the onh^ instance of a canine wife-beater that has 
ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat 
excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a 
little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black 
as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and two cairn- 
gorms for eyes. To the human observer, he is decidedly 
well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems ab- 
horrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume 
and sword-knot order, he was born with a nice sense of 
gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most 
outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like 
a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his eari 
tattered like a regimental banner; and yet he would 
scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady' 
upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame 
who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great- 
heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant 
tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul's tragedy. 
After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, 
in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 241 

been Shakespeare he would then have written Troilus 
and Cressida to brand the offending sex; but being only 
a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of the 
ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of 
his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, 
fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the same 
hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he pro- 
ceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth re- 
mark, showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common 
both to dogs and men; and that with both a single de- 
liberate violation of the conscience loosens all. "But 
while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, 
"the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered 
to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruf- 
fian; and by the handling that he accepted uncomplain- 
ingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin 
to hope the period of Sturm und Drang is closed. 

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The 
duty to the female dog is plain; but where competing 
duties rise, down they will sit and study them out, like 
Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye, some- 
what plain in manner and appearance, but a creature 
compact of amiability and solid wisdom. His family 
going abroad for a winter, he was received for that 
period by an uncle in the same city. The winter over, 
his own family home again, and his own house (of 
which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself 
in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty 
and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, 
but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was 
how he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon 
as the door was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle's, 
visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole 
family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and 
his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice 



242 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

on his part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the par- 
ticular honor and jewel of his day — his morning's walk 
with my father. And, perhaps from this cause, he 
gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at 
length returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the 
same decision served him in another and more distressing 
case of divided duty, which happened not long after. 
He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed 
him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and 
though he did not adore her as he adored my father — 
although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her 
position as "only ^a servant" — he still cherished for her a 
special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some 
streets away to lodgings of her own; and there was 
Coolin in precisely the same situation with any young 
gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a faith- 
ful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the 
problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer 
content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon 
that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, day 
by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for 
some reason which I could never understand and cannot 
approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the 
graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it is the 
difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked 
degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of 
his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it 
were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain 
impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, 
so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to 
the voice of reason. 

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and 
not many people. But the type is one well marked, both 
in the human and the canine family. Gallantry was not 
his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive respect- 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 243 

ability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the con- 
spicuous^ a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city 
uncle modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise 
and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless 
course, he looked for the same precision and an even 
greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. 
It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting 
like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the 
man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death 
of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the 
earth. 

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though 
in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery 
among themselves; for though I think we can perceive 
distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the cri- 
terion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, 
there were several distinct societies or clubs that met 
in the morning to — the phrase is technical — to "rake the 
backets" in a troop. A friend of mine, the master of 
three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they 
had left one club and joined another; but whether it 
was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an 
expulsion_, was more than he could guess. And this il- 
lustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of 
dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. 
At least, in their dealings with men they are not only 
conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. And 
that in the most snobbish manner; for the poor man's 
dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps 
all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged 
tlian his master. And again, for every station they have 
an ideal of behavior, to which the master, under pain 
of derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often 
has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my 
dog was disappointed ; and how much more gladly would 



244 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 

he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in 
the seat of piety! 

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a 
cat; cared little or nothing for men, with whom he 
merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and was entirely 
devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold 
him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, 
I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and 
perished beyond all question in a trap. But this was an 
exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like 
the hairy human infant. The true dog of the nineteenth 
century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large 
acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street- 
dog was once adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, 
he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud, charg- 
ing into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, 
a common rogue and vagabond ; but with his rise into 
society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He 
stole no more, he hunted no more cats ; and conscious 
of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the 
canine upper class was never brought to recognize the 
upstart, and from that hour, except for human counte- 
nance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and 
the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of hap- 
piness, contbnt with his acquired respectability, and 
with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to con- 
demn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his hu- 
man brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as 
rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for 
all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices 
that are born with them remain invincible throughout; 
and they live all their years, glorying in their virtues, 
but still the slaves of their defects. Thus the sage Coolin 
was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, 
a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon 



THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 245 

his conscience; but Woggs,* whose soul's shipwreck 
in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has 
only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly con- 
quered the temptation. The eighth is his favorite com- 
mandment. There is something painfully human in 
these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. 
Still more painful is the bearing of those "stammering 
professors" in the house of sickness and under the terror 
of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or 
other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the un- 
easiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To 
the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the 
conscience ; and at these times his haggard protestations 
form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful 
parody or parallel. 

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation 
between the double etiquette which dogs obey; and that 
those who were most addicted to the showy street life 
among other dogs were less careful in the practice of 
home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that 
mass of ♦carneying affectations, shines equally in either 
sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with 
unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and 
mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning 
point. The attention of man and the regard of other 
dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility; 
but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, they 
would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. 
Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, 
steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with 
sinecures. To push their favor in this world of pickings 
and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and 

* Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; 
under which last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. 
Glory was his aim and he attained it ; for his icon, by the hand of 
Caldecott, now lies among; the treasures of the nation. 



246 A NOTE ON REALISM 

their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our per- 
sistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions 
the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal 
conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted 
nature with too rigid custom ; I see them with our weak- 
nesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with 
our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal ; 
and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in 
air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the 
secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. 
Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they 
indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments 
snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with 
the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure 
of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares 
with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures 
of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the af- 
fection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But 
doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the ob- 
ject of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis 
Quatorze, giving and receiving flattery and favor ; and the 
dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their 
true existence and become the dupes of their ambition. 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

(1883) 

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the 
student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered 
with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he 
may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative 
force, the power of mystery or color, are allotted in the 
hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. 



A NOTE ON REALISM 247 

But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, 
the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, 
the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the im- 
portant, and the preservation of a uniform character 
from end to end — these, which taken together consti- 
tute technical perfection, are to some degree within the 
reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to 
put in and what to leave out; whether some particular 
fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; 
whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken 
or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if 
we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, 
or in some conventional disguise : are questions of plastic 
style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols 
the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable 
riddle to propound. 

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) 
the great change of the past century has been effected 
by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated by the 
romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic 
Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic follow- 
ers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it 
signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of 
the conditions of man's life ; but it has recently (at least 
in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative 
stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. 
With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid be- 
gin to fall a little back from these extremities ; they be- 
gin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation; 
after the succinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as 
a means to this, after a general lightening of this bag- 
gage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling 
story — one, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a 
parable — begin to be pampered upon facts. The intro- 
duction of these details developed a particular ability 



248 A NOTE ON REALISM 

of hand; and that ability^ childishly indulged, has led 
to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. 
A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends 
himself on technical successes. To afford a popular 
flavor and attract the mob_, he adds a steady current of 
what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is ex- 
citing to the moralist; but what more particularly in- 
terests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of de- 
tail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into 
mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day 
even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible 
colors and visible sounds. 

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may 
serve to remind us of the fact which underlies a very 
dusty conflict of the critics. All representative art, 
which can be said to live, is both realistic and ideal ; and 
the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely 
of externals. It is no especial cultus of nature and 
veracity, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has 
made us turn our back upon the larger, more various, 
and more romantic art of yore. A photographic ex- 
actitude in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion; but 
even in the ablest hands it tells us no more — I think 
it even tells us less than Moliere, wielding his arti- 
ficial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste 
or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is 
forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions of man's nature 
and the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary 
art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet 
comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The 
scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of 
Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And 
by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page 
of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, 
it must be that Troilus and Cressida which Shakespeare, 



A NOTE ON REALISM 249 

in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world, grafted on 
the heroic story of the siege of Troy. 

This question of realism, let it then be clearly under- 
stood, regards not in the least degree* the fundamental 
truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art. 
Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you will be 
none the less veracious ; but if you be weak, you run the 
risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be 
very strong and honest, you may chance upon a master- 
piece. 

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; 
during the period of gestation it stands more clearly 
forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive 
lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, 
but also, alas ! that incommunicable product of the hu- 
man mind, a perfected design. On the approach to 
execution all is changed. The artist must now step 
down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. 
He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his deli- 
cate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, al- 
most in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the 
particularity of execution of his whole design. 

The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a 
technical preoccupation stands them instead of some 
robuster principle of life. And with these the execution 
is but play; for the stylistic problem is resolved before- 
hand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully fore- 
gone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, which 
we have learned to admire, with a certain smiling admira- 
tion, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, 
too, are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth 
of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of 
design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to be- 
gin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, since, in the first, 
the style was dictated by the nature of the plan; and 



260 A NOTE ON REALISM 

Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, 
enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. 
But the case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art 
that have been conceived from within outward, and 
generously nourished from the author's mind, the mo- 
ment in which he begins to execute is one of extreme 
perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy 
and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this 
ungrateful effort once for all; and, having formed a 
style, adhere to it through life. But those of a higher 
order cannot rest content with a process which, as they 
continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate toward 
the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work 
in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engage- 
ment of the whole forces of their mind ; and the changing 
views which accompany the growth of their experience 
are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the 
manner of their art. So that criticism loves to dwell 
upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, 
a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive mo- 
ment when execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a 
less degree, that the ideal and the real do indeed, like 
good and evil angels, contend for the direction of the 
work. Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the needle, 
and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable 
impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of 
insubordination. It is the work and it is a great part 
of the delight of any artist to contend with these unruly 
tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, 
to drive and coax them to effect his will. Given these 
means, so laughably inadequate, and given the interest, 
the intensity, and the multiplicity of the actual sensa- 
tion whose effect he is to render with their aid, the artist 
has one main and necessary resource which he must, in 



1 



A NOTE ON REALISM 251 

everj'^ case and upon any theory, employ. He must, that 
is, suppress much and omit more. He must omit what is 
tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and 
necessar3^ But such facts as, in regard to the main de- 
sign, subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce 
and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the very highest 
order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such. 
There, any fact that is registered is contrived a double 
or a* treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in 
its place, and pillar in the main design. Nothing would 
find room in such a picture that did not serve, at once, 
to complete the composition, to accentuate the scheme 
of color, to distinguish the planes of distance, and to 
strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would 
be allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time, 
expedite the progress of the fable, build up the char- 
acters, and strike home the moral or the philosophical 
design. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so far from 
building the fabric of our works exclusively with these, 
we are thrown into a rapture if we think we can muster 
a* dozen or a score of them, to be the plums of our con- 
fection. And hence, in order that the canvas may be 
filled or the story proceed from point to point, other 
details must be admitted. Thej^ must be admitted, alas ! 
upon a doubtful title; many without marriage robes. 
Thus any work of art, as it proceeds toward comple- 
tion, too often — I had almost written always — ^loses in 
force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is 
swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestra- 
tion; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of 
descriptive eloquence or slipshod talk. 

But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those 
particulars which we know we can describe; and hence 
those most of all which, having been described very often, 
have grown to be conventionally treated in the prac- 



252 A NOTE ON REALISM 

tice of our -art. These we choose_, as the mason chooses 
the acanthus to adorn his capital^ because they come 
naturally to the accustomed hand. The old stock inci- 
dents and accessories, tricks of workmanship, and 
schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or 
they would long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt 
our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly appro- 
priate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean 
us from the study of nature and the uncompromising 
practice of art. To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh 
solutions, and give expression to facts which have not 
yet been adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is 
to run a little upon the danger of extreme self-love. 
Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the 
artist may easily fall into the error of the French nat- 
uralists, and consider any fact as welcome to admission 
if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork; or, again, 
into the error of the modern landscape-painter, who is 
apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well dis- 
played can take the place of what is, after all, the one 
excuse and breath of art — charm. A little further, 
and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy 
sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious 
passage as an infidelity to art. 

We have now the matter of this difference before us. 
The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater out- 
lines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of 
the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly sup- 
pressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with 
a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of any- 
thing so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, 
all hot-pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, 
seizing the eye. The style that befits either of these 
extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary dis^- 
abilities and dangers. The immediate danger of the 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 253 

realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the 
whole to local dexterity, or_, in the insane pursuit of 
completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he 
comes in the last resort, and as his energy declines, to 
discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific 
thoroughness, steadily to communicate matter which is 
not worth learning. The danger of the idealist is of 
course, to become merely null and lose all grip of fact, 
particularity, or passion. 

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is 
good which is conceived with honesty and executed with 
communicative ardor. But though on neither side is 
dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist 
must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet 
afresh for each succeeding work and new creation; yet 
one thing may be generally said, that we of the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do the 
intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err 
upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal. 
Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct 
our own decisions, always holding back the hand from 
the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and reso- 
lutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, 
passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last 
and least, romantic in design. 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

(1884) 

I 

We have recently enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: 
hearing, in some detail, the opinions, about the art they 
practise, of Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; 



264 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

two men certainly of very different calibre: Mr. James 
so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous 
of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so 
persuasive and humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the 
very type of the deliberate artist, Mr. Besant the im- 
personation of good-nature. That such doctors should 
differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in 
which they seem to agree fills me, I confess, with won- 
der. For they are both content to talk about the "art 
of fiction" ; and Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly bold, 
goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to the 
"art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean noth- 
ing but the art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only 
comparable with the art of prose. For that heat and 
height of sane emotion which we agree to call by the 
name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; 
present, at times, in any art, more often absent from 
them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too fre- 
quently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is in the 
same case ; it is no substantive art, but an element which 
enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, 
Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in 
fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth or 
Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree 
into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. 
James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, re- 
garded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. 
Let me suggest another; let me suggest that what both 
Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither more 
nor less than the art of narrative. 

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the 
modern English novel," the stay and breadwinner of 
Mr. Mudie ; and in the author of the most pleasing novel 
on that roll. All Sorts and Conditions of Men, the de- 
sire is natural enough. I can conceive, then, that he 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 255 

■would hasten to propose two additions_, and read tlius: 
the art of fictitious narrative in prose. 

Now the fact of the existence of the modern English 
novel is not to be denied; materially, with its three 
volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, it is easily 
distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to 
talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful 
to build our definitions on some more fundamental 
ground than binding. Why, then, are we to add "in 
prose?" The Odyssey appears to me the best of ro- 
mances; T.he Lady of the Lake to stand high in the 
second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to con- 
tain more of the matter and art of the modern English 
novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether 
a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian 
stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the chipped 
phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of 
narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a 
noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem 
of narration in the same way, if not to the same de- 
gree, as the choice of measured verse; for both imply a 
closer synthesis of events, a higher key of dialogue, and 
a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are 
to refuse Do7i Juan-, it is hard to see why you should in- 
clude Zanoni or (to bracket works of very different 
value) The Scarlet Letter; and by what discrimination 
are you to open your doors to The Pilgrim's Progress 
and close them on The Faery Queen? To bring things 
closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a 
conundrum. A narrative called Paradise Lost was writ- 
ten in English verse by one John Milton; what was it 
then.f* It was next translated by Chateaubriand into 
French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the 
French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of 
George Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an 



256 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

English novel; and, in the name of clearness, what was 
it then? 

But, once more, why should we add "fictitious?" 
The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if 
something more recondite, does not want for weight. 
The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is 
applied to the selection and illustration of a real series 
of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's Life of 
Johnson (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its 
success to the same technical manceuvres as (let us say) 
Tom Jones: the clear conception of certain characters of 
man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents 
out of a great number that offered, and the invention 
(yes, invention) and preservation of a certain key in 
dialogue. In which these things are done with the more 
art — in Avhicli with the greater air of nature — readers 
will differently judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very spe- 
cial case, and almost a generic; but it is not only in Bos- 
well, it is in every biography with any salt of life, it 
is in every history where events and men, rather than 
ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, 
in Macaulay — that the novelist will find many of his own 
methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled. He 
will find besides that he, who is free — who has the right 
to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, 
more precious still, of wholesale omission — is frequently 
defeated, and, with all his advantages, leaves a less 
strong impression of reality and passion. Mr. James 
utters his mind with a becoming fervor on the sanctity 
of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination 
truth will seem a word of very debatable propriety, not 
only for the labors of the novelist, but for those of the 
historian. No art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. 
James — can successfully "compete with life" ; and the 
art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish montibus 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 257 

aviis. Life goes before us, infinite in complication; at- 
tended by the most various and surprising meteors; ap- 
pealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind — the 
seat of wonder, to the touch — so thrillingly delicate, and 
to the belly — so imperious when starved. It combines 
and employs in its manifestation the method and ma- 
terial, not of one art only, but of all the arts. Music is 
but an arbitrary trifling with a. few of life's majestic 
chords ; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of 
light and color; literature does but dryly indicate that 
wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, 
action, rapture, and agony, with which it teems. To 
"compete with life," whose sun we cannot look upon, 
whose passions and diseases waste and slay us — to com- 
pete with the flavor of wine, the beauty of the dawn, 
the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separa- 
tion — here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; 
here are, indeed, labors for a Hercules in a dress coat, 
armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, 
armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the 
portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this 
sense: none can "compete with life": not even history, 
built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed 
of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read 
of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are sur- 
prised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our 
pulse be quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, 
that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, 
purely agreeable ; that these phantom reproductions of 
experience, even at their most acute, convey decided 
pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, 
can torture and slay. 

What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, 
and what the source of its power .^^ The whole secret 
is that no art does "compete with life." Man's one 



258 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut 
his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The 
arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their 
eyes from the gross, colored, and mobile nature at our 
feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstrac- 
tion. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never 
seen in nature; asked about a green circle or an iron 
circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. 
Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, 
gives up truth of color, as it had already given up relief 
and movement; and instead of vying with nature, ar- 
ranges a scheme of harmonious tints. Literature, above 
all in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, simi- 
larly flees the direct challenge and pursues in'ktead an 
independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at 
all, it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of 
human destiny, but the emphasis and the suppressions 
with which the human actor tells of them. The real art 
that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who 
told their stories round the savage camp-fire. Our art 
is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in 
making stories true as in making them typical; not so 
much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in 
marshalling all of them toward a common end. For the 
welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which 
life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of 
impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all 
aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, 
all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like 
the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chap- 
ters," from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well- 
written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and 
controlling thought; to this must every incident and 
character contribute; the style must have been pitched 
in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 259 

that looks another way, the book would be stronger, 
clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life 
is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a 
work of art, in comparison, is- neat, finite, self-contained, 
rational, flowing, and emasculate. Life imposes by brute 
energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, 
among the far louder noises of experience, like an air 
artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition 
of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposi- 
tion of geometry is' a fair and luminous parallel for a 
work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the 
crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it. 
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its re- 
semblances to life, which are forced and material, as a 
shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasur- 
able difference from life, which is designed and signifi- 
cant, and is both the method and the meaning of the 
work. 

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the 
inexhaustible magazine from which subjects are to be 
selected; the name of these is legion; and with each 
new subject — for here again I must differ by the whole 
width of heaven from Mr. James — the true artist will 
vary his method and change the point of attack. That 
which was in one case an excellence, will become a de- 
fect in another; what was the making of one book, will 
in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, 
and then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. 
I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are 
fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which ap- 
peals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical ten- 
dencies in man; second, the novel of character, which 
appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles 
and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, the 
dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as the 



260 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature 
and moral judgment. 

And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James re- 
fers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little book 
about a quest for hidden treasure ; but he lets fall, by the 
way, some rather startling words. In this book he 
misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being 
able to quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most 
of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by 
the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin 
to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and 
the volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. 
James's reason. He cannot criticise the author, as he 
goes, "because," says he, comparing it with another 
work, "I hazie been a child, but I have never been on a 
quest for buried treasure." Here is, indeed, a wilful 
paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried 
treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been 
a child. There never was a child (unless Master 
James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a 
military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; 
but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and 
imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved 
the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence 
and beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has pro- 
tested with excellent reason against too narrow a con- 
ception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, 
the "faintest hints of life" are converted into revela- 
tions; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority 
of cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and 
effect of those things wJiicli he has only wished to do, 
than of those which he has done. Desire is a wonder- 
ful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, 
while it is true that neither Mr, James nor the author 
of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 261 

gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have 
ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of 
such a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, 
counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low- 
minded man!) that this class of interest, having been 
frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten 
road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself 
throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of 
this boyish dream. Character to the boy is a sealed 
book ; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, 
and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for 
the sake of circumstantiation and because he was him- 
self more or less grown up, admitted character, within 
certain limits, into his design; but only within certain 
limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of 
another sort, they had been drawn to very different 
purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the 
characters need to be presented with but one class of 
qualities — the warlike and formidable. So as they ap- 
pear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, thej'^ 
have served their end. Danger is the matter with which 
this class of novel deals ; fear, the passion with which 
it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only 
so far as they realize the sense of danger and provoke 
the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too 
clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest 
while we are running the fox of material interest, is 
not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The stupid 
reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose 
the scent. 

The novel of character has this difference from all 
others : that it requires no coherency of plot, and for this 
reason, as in the case of Gil Bias, it is sometimes called 
the novel of adventure. It turns on the humors of the 
persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied 



262 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

in incidents^ but the incidents themselves, being tributary, 
need not march in a progression; and the characters 
may be statically shown. As they enter, so they may 
go out ; they must be consistent, but they need not grow. 
Here Mr. James will recognize the note of much of his 
own work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of 
character, studying it at rest or only gently moved; and, 
with his usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he 
avoids those stronger passions which would deform the 
attitude he loves to study, and change his sitters from 
the humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and 
bare types of more emotional moments. In his recent 
Author of Beltra^o, so just in cenception, so nimble 
and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed em- 
ployed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in 
the heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; 
and the great struggle, the true tragedy, the scene-a- 
faire, passes unseen behind the panels of a locked door. 
The delectable invention of the young visitor is intro- 
duced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, 
true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion. I 
trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing 
this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it belongs 
to one marked class of novel, and that it would have 
been very differently conceived and treated had it be- 
longed to that other marked class, of which I now pro- 
ceed to speak. 

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that 
name, because it enables me to point out by the way 
a strange and peculiarly English misconception. It is 
sometimes supposed that the drama consists of incident. 
It consists of passion, which gives the actor his oppor- 
tunity; and that passion must progressively increase, or 
the actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to 
carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of in- 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 263 

terest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore 
be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life_, where 
duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the 
same is true of what I call, for that reason, the dramatic 
novel. I will instance a few worthy specimens, all of 
our own day and language; Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, 
that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,* 
and hunted for at, book-stalls like an Aldine; Hardy's 
Pair of Blue Eyes; smd two of Charles Reade's, Grif- 
fth Gaunt and The Double Marriage, originally called 
White Lies, and founded (by an accident quaintly 
favorable to my nomenclature) on a Jjlay by Maquet, 
the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel 
the closed door of The Author of Beltraffio must be 
broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and 
utter its last word ; passion is the be-all and the end-all, 
the plot and the solution, the protagonist and the deus ex 
machina in one. The characters may come anyhow upon 
the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they 
leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out 
of themselves by passion. It may be part of the design 
to draw them with detail; to depict a full-length char- 
acter, and then behold it melt and change in the fur- 
nace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the sort; 
nice portraiture is not required; and we are content 
to accept mere abstract types, so they be strongly and 
sincerely moved. A novel of this class may be even 
great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be 
great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed 
heart and the impersonal utterance of passion; and 
with an artist of the second class it is, indeed, even 
more likely to be great, when the issue has thus been 
narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind di- 
rected to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its 
* Now no longer so, thank Heaven ! 



264 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

fair field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry 
upon this more solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, 
an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of a 
passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All 
should be plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence 
it is that, in Rhoda Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises such re- 
sentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her 
ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of 
her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader 
when Balzac, after having begun the Duchesse de 
Langieais in terms of strong if somewhat swollen pas- 
sion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's 
clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the 
novel of character; they are out of place in the high 
society of the passions ; when the passions are introduced 
in art at the full height, we look to see them, not 
baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering 
above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate. 

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid 
sense, to intervene. To much of what I have said he 
would apparently demur; in much he would, somewhat 
impatiently, acquie«ce. It may be true; but it is not 
what he desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of 
the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the 
brushes, the palette, and the north light. He uttered 
his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; 
I, with the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive 
student. But the point, I may reply, is not merely to 
amuse the public, but to offer helpful advice to the 
young writer. And the young writer will not so much 
be helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire 
to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must be 
on the lowest terms. The best that we can say to him 
is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character 



A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 265 

or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every 
incident is an illustration of the motive, and every 
property employed shall bear to it a near relation of 
congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as some- 
times in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or 
complement of the main intrigue ; suffer not his style 
to flag below the level of the argument; pitch the key 
of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk 
in parlors, but with a single eye to the degree of pas- 
sion he may be called on to express ; and allow neither 
himself in the narrative nor any character in the course 
of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part 
and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion 
of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this 
shortens his book ; it will be better so ; for to add ir- 
relevant matter i;s not to lengthen but to bury. Let him 
not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he 
keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. 
Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of con- 
versation, the pungent material detail of the day's man- 
ners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the envi- 
ronment. These elements are not essential: a novel 
may be excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion 
or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises 
clearer from material circumstances. In this age of 
the particular, let him remember the ages of the ab- 
stract, the great books of the past, the brave men that 
lived before Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as 
the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that 
his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its 
exactitude ; but a simplification of some side or point 
of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For 
although, in great men, working upon great motives, 
what we observe and admire is often their complexity. 



266 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 

yet underneath appearances the truth remains un- 
changed: that simplification was their method, and that 
simplicity is their excellence. 

II 

Since the above was written another novelist has 
entered repeatedly the lists of theory: one well worthy 
of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none ever couched 
a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and 
those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; 
he is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he dreams 
of an advance in art like what there is in science; he 
thinks of past things as radically dead ; he thinks a 
form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own 
history; a strange forgetfulness of the history of the 
race ! Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works (could 
he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much 
of this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds 
all the poor little orthodoxies of the day — no poorer and 
no smaller than those of yesterday or to-morrow, poor 
and small, indeed, only so far as they are exclusive — 
the living quality of much that he has done is of a con- 
trary, I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A 
man, as I read him, of an originally strong romantic 
bent — a certain glow of romance still resides in many 
of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by 
accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and 
it is then, as often as not, that his reader rejoices — 
justly, as I contend. For in all this excessive eagerness 
to be centrally human, is there not one central human 
thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect : 
I mean himself.^ A poet, a finished artist, a man in love 
with the appearances of life, a cunning reader of the 
mind, he has other passions and aspirations than those 



OLD MORTALITY 267 

he loves to draw. And why should he suppress himself 
and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The 
obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules 
and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the con- 
temporary shape, and thus attain_, in the eyes of the 
true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; 
and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw the normal, 
a man should draw the null, and write the novel of 
society instead of the romance of man. 



OLD MORTALITY 

(1884) 

I 

There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one 
side by a prison, on the other by the windows of a 
quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the 
traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the en- 
gine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all 
day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepul- 
chres of families, door beyond door, like houses in a 
street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison 
turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the 
graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be 
unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my mem- 
ory of the place. I here made friends with a certain 
plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, 
gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place 
that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter 
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for 
some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a win- 
dow and kept my wild heart frying; and once — she pos- 



268 OLD MORTALITY 

sibly remembers — the wise Eugenia followed me to that 
austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the 
shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her 
to repair the braid. But for the most part I went there 
solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on the 
names of the forgotten. Name after name, and to each 
the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a regi- 
ment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, 
and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, 
in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old 
mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced there was 
but one of whom my fancy had received a picture ; and 
he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and 
habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and 
popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that com- 
pany of phantom appellations. It was then possible 
to leave behind us sometliing more explicit than these 
severe, monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing 
left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call 
the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable 
than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay com- 
posed beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a 
dream; and when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled 
and beckoned from the open window, the fame of that 
bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea. 
And yet in soberness I cared as little for the house- 
maid as for David Hume. The interests of youth are 
rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's dove, come home 
to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own 
nature, that is all that he has learned to recognize. 
The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of 
routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him 
with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to 
walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the 
course of years, and after much rubbing with his fel- 



OLD MORTALITY 269 

lowmen, that he begins by glimpses to see himself 
from without and his fellows from within: to know his 
own for one among the thousand undenoted counte- 
nances of the city street, and to divine in others the 
throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he 
will avoid the hospital doors, the pale^ faces, the crip- 
ple, the sweet whiff of chloroform — for there, on the 
most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; 
but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the 
aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's 
life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned 
by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come 
for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot 
bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and^' 
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.' 
The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. 
To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first 
needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem 
not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in 
evil part; that young men may come to think of time as 
of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back 
the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is 
that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, 
with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memo- 
rials of the dead. 

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human 
import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, 
busyness, importance, and immediacy of that life in 
which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, 
to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadow- 
ing the complexity of that game of consequences to 
which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But 
the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in 
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so 
little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous 



270 OLD MORTALITY 

fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the aver- 
age book a writer may be silent; he may set it down 
to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid 
fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the 
cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who 
led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The 
day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to 
count Moll Flanders, ay, or The Country Wife, more 
wholesome and more pious diet than these guide-books 
to consistent egoism. 

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the 
inhumanity of Obermann, And even while I still con- 
tinued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began in- 
sensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and 
was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of 
visitors. This was day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such 
great darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to 
try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and 
modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at 
them externally from the prison windows of my affecta- 
tion. Once I remember to have observed two working- 
women with a baby halting by a grave ; there was some- 
thing monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying 
the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her 
side. A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had 
thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I overheard 
their judgment on that wonder. "Eh! what extrava- 
gance !" To a youth afflicted with the callosity of senti- 
ment, this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely 
base. 

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its 
length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found 
plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan 
Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told 
me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended 



OLD MORTALITY 271 

on his labors; how some would even perch about him, 
waiting for their prey ; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, 
how the species varied with the season of the year. But 
this was the very poetry of the profession. The others 
whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavor of the 
gardener hung about them, but sophisticated and dis- 
bloomed. They had engagements to keep, not alone 
with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man- 
kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And 
thus there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the 
hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men 
wrapped up in their grim business ; they liked well to 
open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and 
throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their 
minds a calendar of names and dates. It would be 
*'in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened for 
"Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past 
patients — familiarly but not without respect, like old 
family servants. Here is indeed a servant whom we 
forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright 
table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently 
smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his 
faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To 
suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial 
touch savors of paradox; yet he was surely in error 
when he attributed insensibility to the digger of the 
grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge 
should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from 
the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his 
years of office, might have at least suggested other 
thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A 
cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an 
author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from 
the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. 
He would indeed be something different from human if 



272 OLD MORTALITY 

liis solitary open-air and tragic labors left not a broad 
mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart 
from city clamor, among the cats and robins and the 
ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the 
continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like 
minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts 
them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps 
appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the 
kindly influence of habit grows to be his pride and 
pleasure. There are many common stories telling how 
he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will 
rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose 
unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He 
dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard; 
and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he could 
see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright 
and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think a Mod- 
erate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman 
view of death-bed dispositions ; for he told the old man 
that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his 
life had been easy and reputable, that his family had 
all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it 
now behooved him unregretfully to gird his loins and 
follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out; 
then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the 
other hand pointed through the window to the scene 
of his life-long labors. "Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid 
three hunner and fowerscore in that kirkyaird; an it had 
been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I would ha'e likit 
weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was 
not to be ; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another 
part to play; and the time had come when others were 
to gird and carry him. 



OLD MORTALITY 273 



II 



I would fain strike a note that should be more 
heroical ; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, 
hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else 
than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he 
sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his 
is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be 
your cue; for vrhere a man is all pride, vanity, and per- 
sonal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In 
every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to 
be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this 
poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned 
the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed 
on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant 
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, 
and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before 
him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar 
to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or his own 
last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but 
now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not 
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, be- 
reaving and yet storing up. 

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own 
ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through 
story after story of our vanity and aspiration, and 
sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to 
measure the stature of our friends: how they stand 
between us and our own contempt, believing in our 
best; how, linking us with others, and still spreading 
wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with 
the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size 
they dwarf the virtues and the vices that appeared 
gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when such 
a pin falls out — when there vanishes in the least breath 



274 OLD MORTALITY 

of time one of those rich magazines of life on which 
we drew for our supply — when he who had first dawned 
upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and still 
growing, came to bulk on our regard with those clear 
features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath 
to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a 
whole wing of the palace of our life. 



Ill 

One such face I now remember; one such blank 
some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. In his youth 
he was most beautiful in person, most serene and ge- 
nial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint 
thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had 
the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his 
equals, and to the poorest student gentle and attentive. 
Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw 
him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for 
higher destinies ; we loved his notice ; and I have rarely 
had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my 
father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked 
among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with non- 
chalance the seeds of a most influential life. 

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mys- 
tery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, 
we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he 
was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, 
urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something 
soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, 
witty, innocent, and inhumane; and by a misapplied 
Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I 
can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the 
lamplit streets, JLa ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble 



] 



OLD MORTALITY 275 

figure of a youth, but following vanity and incredulous 
of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas 
of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and 
his self-respect, miserably went down. 

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came 
desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and considera- 
tion; creeping to the family he had deserted; with 
broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there 
was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the 
wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them 
gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded 
pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned 
to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious 
youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to re- 
trieve the irretrievable ; at times still grappling with that 
mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying 
in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with 
kindlier music; and over all his thoughts tlie shadow of 
that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which 
had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils 
had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still 
without complaint, still finding interests; to his last 
step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile. 

The tale of this great failure is, to those who re- 
mained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth 
he took thought for no one but himself; when he came 
ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think 
of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, 
such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that 
impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; 
even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. 
You would not have dreamed, if you had known him 
then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to 
young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed 
and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot 



276 OLD MORTALITY 

with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves 
in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give 
ear and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some re- 
turn of our own thoughts that we were reminded what 
manner of man this was to whom v/e disembosomed: 
a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the gar- 
den of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed 
and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then 
something took us by the throat; and to see him there,- 
so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not 
cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration 
that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old 
fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in 
that lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight. 
He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, 
like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the 
lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, 
finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, 
rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when 
they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness 
of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and 
passed sentence: mene, mene; and condemned himself 
to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had 
earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to 
murmur. 

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in 
his days of strength; but on the coming of adversity, 
and when that strength was gone that had betrayed 
him — "for our strength is weakness" — he began to blos- 
som and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: 
the burden that he bore thrown down before the great 
deliverer. We 

"in the vast cathedral leave him: 
God accept him, 
Christ receive him!" 



THE MANSE 277 



IV 



If we go now and look on these innumerable 
epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. 
They do not stand merely to the dead, these foolish 
monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to 
glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man. This 
ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. 

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last 
resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling 
that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he 
is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and an 
ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his 
memory shines like a reproach; they honor him for 
silent lessons ; they cherish his' example ; and in what 
remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy 
of the dead. For this proud man was one of those who 

prospered in the valley of humiliation; of whom 

Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard 
hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell 
you, that in former times men have met with angels 
here; have found pearls here; and have in this place 
found the words of life." 



THE MANSE 

(1887) 

I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in 
my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and 
often I desire to look upon it again; and the choice of 
a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a cer- 
tain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river 
is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill 
just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the 



278 THE MANSE 

sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; 
and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings 
of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily 
in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy 
eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills 
solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so 
it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, 
and the pruning-knife have been busy; and if I could 
hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on 
many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as 
well as the point of view, a certain moment in my 
growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, and the 
trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to 
heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am 
standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the 
season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a 
cup with sunshine and the songs of birds ; — and the 
year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side 
I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged. 
It was a place in that time like no other: the garden 
cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over- 
looked by the church and the terrace of the churchyard, 
where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall 
"spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; 
flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the 
grpat yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; 
the smell of water rising from all round, with an added 
tang of paper-mills ; the sound of water everywhere, and 
the sound of mills — the wheel and the dam singing their 
alternate strain; the birds on every bush and from 
every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their 
notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the 
midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of 
my childish stature, as a great and roomy house. In 
truth, it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet so con- 



THE MANSE 279 

venient, and, standing where it did, it is difficult to sup- 
pose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of stal- 
wart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, 
and came to man and womanhood in that nest of little 
chambers; so that the face of the earth was peppered 
with the children of the manse, and letters with out- 
landish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and 
the walls of the little chambers brightened with the 
wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a 
house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: 
a well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt on by 
many travellers. 

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of 
men. I read him, judging with older criticism the re- 
port of childish observation, as a man of singular sim- 
plicity of nature ; unemotional, and hating the display 
of what he felt ; standing contented on the old ways ; 
a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We 
children admired him; partly for his beautiful face and 
silver hair, for none more than children are concerned 
for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly 
for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a 
week, the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But 
his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of 
old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us 
with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much 
alone, writing sermons or letters to his scattered family 
in a dark and cold room with a library of bloodless 
books — or so they seemed in those days, although I 
have some of them now on my own shelves and like well 
enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped 
him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But 
the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian 
pictures, gaudily colored and dear to young eyes. I 
cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the 



280 THE MANSE 

greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once 
sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quak- 
ing indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with 
hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an 
Indian picture. 

"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will 
He slumber that thee keeps," 

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, 
a sad model to set in childhood before one who was him- 
self to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that really 
merited reward. And I must suppose the old man 
thought so too, and was either touched or amused by 
the performance; for he took me in his arms with most 
unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a 
little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that 
day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this 
reception into so tender a surprise that I forgot my 
disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of those 
that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design 
upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my 
grandfather should strip himself of one of those pic- 
tures, love-gifts and reminders of his absent sons; noth- 
ing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon 
me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all 
that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blub- 
bered under the rod in the last century; and his ways 
were still Spartan for the young. The last word I 
heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had 
over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now 
near the end of his many days. He sat by the dining- 
room fire, with his white hair, pale face, and bloodshot 
eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given 
him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, Dr. 



THE MANSE 281 

Gregory's powder. Now that remedy^ as the work of a 
near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savor 
of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly 
to the palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a 
wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with per- 
fect simplicity, like a child's, munching a "barley-sugar 
kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in 
her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he 
interfered at once. I had had no Gregory ; then I should 
have no barley-sugar kiss: so he decided with a touch 
of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming oppor- 
tunely to the kitchen door — for such was our unlordly 
fashion — I was taken for the last time from the presence 
of my grandfather. 

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this 
old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond 
of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never 
heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. 
He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and 
I have sought it in both hemispheres ; but whereas he 
found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a 
great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have 
been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, 
and am persuaded I can read him ^ell, though I own 
I never have been told so. He made embroidery, de- 
signing his own patterns ; and in that kind of work 
I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin 
wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black 
as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved 
port, and nuts, and porter ; and so do I, but they agreed 
better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach 
of contract. He had chalk-stones in his fingers ; and 
these, in good time, I may possibly inherit, but I 
would much rather have inherited his noble presence. 
Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the rev- 



282 THE MANSE 

erend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as 
I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers 
words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and 
centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I 
learned the love of mills — or had I an ancestor a miller? 
— and a kindness for the neighborhood of graves, as 
homely things not without their poetry — or had I an 
ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he 
played himself? — for that, too, was a scene of my edu- 
cation. Some part of me played there in the eighteenth 
century, and ran races under the green avenue at Pilrig; 
some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still 
a country place, and sat on the High School benches, 
and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr.. Adam. The house 
where I spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but 
we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its 
site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gar- 
dener's. All this I had forgotten; only my grandfather 
remembered and once reminded me. I have forgotten, 
too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our 
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married 
a daughter of Burns's Dr. Smith — "Smith opens out his 
cauld harangues." I have forgotten, but I was there 
all the same, and heard stories of Burns at first hand. 

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this 
homuncidus or part-man of mine that walked about the 
eighteenth century with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was 
in the way of meeting other homunculus or part-men, in 
the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a 
lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them 
duly. But as I went to college with Dr. Balfour, I 
may have seen the lamp and oil man taking down the 
shutters from his shop beside the Tron; — we may have 
had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a cer- 
tain carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old. 



THE MANSE 283 

smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion, we may 
have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flower- 
garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. 
And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side ; 
and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of 
my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked 
out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all 
this would cross the mind of the young student, as he 
posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in that 
city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. 
It would not cross his mind that he should have a 
daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, 
by a not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse- 
engineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, 
in the fulness of time, should wed; and some portion 
of that student himself should survive yet a year or 
two longer in the person of their child. 

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the 
arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation 
of long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the 
careers of our homuncuU and be reminded of our 
antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment 
in the history of the elements that build us. Are you 
a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not 
always so. And though to-day I am only a man of let- 
ters, either tradition errs or I was present when there 
landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to 
tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal 
Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debatable Land 
and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present 
when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled Jacob- 
ites to France after the '15; I was in a West India mer- 
chant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nichol 
Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in 
St. Kitt's; I was with my engineer-grandfather (the 



284. THE MANSE 

son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he sailed nortli 
about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the 
Pirate and the Lord of the Isles; I was with him, too, 
on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the Smeaton had 
drifted from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick 
in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he must 
stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter 
audible words; and once more with him when the Bell 
Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into 
the tower, then nearly finished, and sat unmoved reading 
in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one after another 
slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engi- 
neer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and met ad- 
ventures, and sometimes met them well. And away in 
the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can 
be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and 
millions of ascendants : Picts who rallied round Macbeth 
and the old (and highly preferable) system of descent 
by females, fleers from before the legions of Agricola, 
marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chal- 
daean plateaus ; and, f urtherest of all, what face is this 
that fancy can see peering through the disparted 
branches ? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what 
muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably 
arboreal in his habits. ... 

And I know not which is the more strange, that I 
should carry about with me some fibres of my minister- 
grandfather ; or that in him, as he sat in his cool study, 
grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an ab- 
original frisking of the blood that was not his ; tree-top 
memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in 
his mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; 
and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from 
a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the 
old divine. 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 

1887 



All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and 
pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was 
always busy on my own private end_, which was to learn 
to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to 
read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy 
fitting what I saw with appropriate words ; when I sat 
by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a 
penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down 
the features of the scene or commemorate some halting 
stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus 
wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously 
for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an 
author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed 
that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency 
that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men 
learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description 
was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one 
with senses there is always something worth describing, 
and town and country are but one continuous subject. 
But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied 
my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played 
many parts ; and often exercised myself in writing down 
conversations from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries 
I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily 
discarded, finding them a - school of posturing and 
melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the 
most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, 

285 



286 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 

it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) 
the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the 
choice of the essential note and the right word: things 
that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by na- 
ture. And regarded as training, it had one grave de- 
fect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that 
there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly 
more effort, in my secret labors at home. Whenever I 
read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, 
in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with 
propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous 
force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit 
down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was 
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was 
again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least 
in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in 
harmony, in construction, and in the co-ordination of 
parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, 
to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to 
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and 
to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, 
which was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have 
had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I 
had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were 
apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the 
first part was written (which is my reason for recalling 
it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: 
first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of 
Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, 
in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with 
my other works: Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) 
an imitation of Sordello; Robin Hood, a tale in verse, 
took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats^ 
Chaucer, and Morris ; in Monmouth, a tragedy, I re- 
clined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumer- 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 287 

able gouty-footed lyrics^ I followed many masters; in 
the first draft of The King's Pardon, a tragedy, I was 
on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the 
second draft of the same piece, with staggering versa- 
tility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of 
course conceived my fable in a less serious vein — for it 
was not Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that 
I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of 
thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of 
the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Booh of 
Snobs. So I might go on forever, through all my 
abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I 
think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived 
at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but 
have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by 
another hand, came on the stage itself and was played 
by bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semi- 
ramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on book-stalls under 
the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to 
show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely 
ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper. 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; 
whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was 
so Keats learned, and there was never a finer tempera- 
ment for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could 
trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why 
a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded 
by a cast back to earlier and freslier models. Perhaps 
I hear some one cry out: But this is not the way to 
be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be 
born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there 
anything in this training that shall clip the wings of 
your originality. There can be none more original than 
Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; 
yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must 



288 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 

have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the 
very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all men 
the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, 
proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school 
that we can expect to have good writers ; it is almost 
invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless 
exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that 
should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what 
cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried 
all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve 
a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the 
literary scales; and it is only after years of such gym- 
nastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words 
;nvarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simul- 
taneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing 
what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a 
man's ability) able to do it. 

And it is the great point of these imitations that there 
still shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable 
model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of fail- 
ure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that 
failure is the only high road to success. I must have 
had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly con- 
demned my own performances. I liked doing them in- 
deed; but when they were done, I could see they were 
rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them 
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be 
my confidants I must have chosen well, for they had the 
friendliness to be quite plain with me. "Padding," said 
one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you 
do lyrics so badly." No more could I ! Thrice I put 
myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by 
sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned : 
and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had 
not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 289 

was the case, there was no good in repeating the ex- 
periment; if they had been looked at — well, then I had 
not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning 
and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune, 
which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was 
able to see my literature in print, and to measure ex- 
perimentally how far I stood from the favor of the 
public. 

II 

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, 
and has counted among its members Scott, Brougham, 
Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, 
and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an 
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the 
very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, 
Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when 
lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some 
goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with 
books in their wire cages ; and a corridor with a fireplace, 
benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a 
mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here 
a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in 
defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Sena- 
tus looks askance at these privileges ; looks even with a 
somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole society; which 
argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the 
world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt 
of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professor- 
ate. 

I sat one December morning in the library of the 
Speculative ; a very humble-minded youth, though it was 
a virtue I never had much credit for; yet proud of my 
privileges as a member of the Spec. ; proud of the pipe 
I was smoking in the teeth of tlie Senatus; and in par- 



290 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 

ticular^ proud of being in the next room to three very 
distinguished students, who were then conversing beside 
the corridor fire. One of these has now his name on 
the back of several vulumes_, and his voice, I learn, is 
influential in the law courts. Of the death of the sec- 
ond, you have just been reading what I had to say. And 
the third also has escaped out of that battle of life in 
which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They 
were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this 
was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambi- 
tious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and 
of all men that I have known, the most like to one of 
Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by 
an ill fortune, that could be properly set forth only in 
the Comedie Humaine. He had then his eye on Par- 
liament; and soon after the time of which I write, he 
made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up 
to heaven next day in the Courant, and the day after 
was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism 
in the Scotsman. Report would have it (I dare say, very 
wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he 
particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge 
had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, 
he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied 
by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was pub- 
licly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less 
finely tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it ren- 
dered reckless ; for he took flight to London, and there, 
in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his considerable 
patrimony in the space of one winter. For years there- 
after he lived I know not how; always well dressed, al- 
warys in good hotels and good society, always with empty 
pockets. The charm of his manner may have stood him 
in good stead; but though my own manners are very 
agreeable, I have never found in them a source of liveli- 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 291 

hood; and to explain tlie miracle of his continued exist- 
ence^ I must fall back upon the theory of the philosopher, 
that in his case^ as in all of the same kind_, "there was a 
suffering relative in the background." From this genteel 
eclipse he reajjpeared upon the scene, and presently 
sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It 
is in this part that I best remember him; tall, slender, 
with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a refined 
gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling 
with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked 
eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking 
low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling 
strange tales with singular deliberation and, to a patient 
listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and downs, 
he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, 
to breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of him- 
self and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon the 
brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found 
the strangest thing in our society : one of those periodical 
sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn 
opinions ; in which young gentlemen from the universities 
are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult 
foreign nations, and calumniate private individuals; and 
which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's 
name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind 
of demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks 
back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and 
crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they 
did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his 
literary works, as I hope you have just done for me. 
Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, 
would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favorite 
slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with 
his own life that my companion disarmed the envy of 
the gods. He fought his paper single-handed; trusting 



292 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 

no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early and 
down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear- 
wigging influential men,, for lie was a master of in- 
gratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there must 
have been a rare vein of courage, that he should thus 
have died at his employment; and doubtless ambition 
spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it 
seems there was a marriage in his view had he suc- 
ceeded. But he died, and his paper died after him ; and 
of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to 
our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing. 

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the 
corridor, under the mural tablet that records the virtues 
of Macbean, the former secretary. We would often 
smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor 
thing to come into the world at all and leave no more be- 
hind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two 
are gone and have left less; and this book, perhaps, 
when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in a 
corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling 
at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the 
love of Alma Mater (which may be still extant and 
flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some 
pence — this book may alone preserve a memory of 
James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown. 

Their thoughts ran very differently on that Decem- 
ber morning; they were all on fire with ambition; and 
when they had called me in to them, and made me a 
sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride 
and hope. We were to found a University magazine. 
A pair of little, active brothers — Livingstone by name, 
great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, 
who kept a book-shop over against the University build- 
ing — had been debauched to play the part of publishers. 
We four were to be conjunct editors and, what was the 



A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 293 

main point of the concern^ to print our own works ; 
while, by every rule of arithmetic — that flatterer of 
credulity — the adventure must succeed and bring great 
profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home 
that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen 
by these three distinguished students was to me the most 
unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of con- 
sideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my fellow- 
men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I 
could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, 
in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would 
be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; 
I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and 
I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my com- 
pact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable 
monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It was a 
comfortable thought to me that I had a father. 

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was 
the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran 
four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without 
a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us 
with prodigious bustle ; the second fell principally into 
the hands of Ferrier and me ; the third I edited alone ; 
and it has long been a solemn question who it was that 
edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more diffi- 
cult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked 
so hopefully in the Livingstones' window ! Poor, harm- 
less paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare 
on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense ! 
And, shall I say. Poor Editors ? I cannot pity myself, 
to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but 
only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when 
the magazine struggled into half -birth, and instantly 
sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy 
to the ladv with whom mv heart was at that time some- 



294 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

what engaged^ and who did all that in her lay to break 
it; and she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my 
cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I 
was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any 
chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that 
I thought the better of her taste. I cleared the decks 
after this lost engagement; had the necessary interview 
with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over 
my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, 
who rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped 
rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these two 
also, embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful 
illusions ; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told 
myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man 
ready ; and to work I went again with my penny version- 
books, having fallen back in one day from the printed 
author to the manuscript student. 

[Editor's Note. — The final short section of this essay is 
omitted, because it is by way of introduction to another 
paper, "An Old Scotch Gardener/' which is not included in 
this collection.] 



BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME 

(1887) 

The Editor* has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his 
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so 
innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until 
after some reconnaissance and review that the writer 
awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the 
nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chap- 

* Of the British Weekly. 



INFLUENCED ME 295 

ter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we 
once all had_, and whom we have all lost and mourned, 
the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. 
But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it 
should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise 
and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too 
much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who 
entrapped me. 

The most influential books, and the truest in their 
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the 
reader to a dogma which he must afterward discover to 
be inexact ; they do not teach him a lesson which he must 
afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they 
clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from our- 
selves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; 
and they show us the web of experience, not as we can 
see it for ourselves, but with a singular change — that 
monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, 
struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to 
the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the 
turn of instruction. But the course of our education is 
answered best by those poems and romances where we 
breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet 
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served 
me best. Few living friends have had upon me an in- 
fluence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The 
last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had 
the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impression- 
able hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has 
ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; 
nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my 
mind, and was the burden of my reflections for long, 
so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in 
sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dear- 



296 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 



est and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artag- 
nan — the elderly D'Artagnan of the Vicomte de Brage 
lonne. I knew not a more human soul, nor, in his waj , 
a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much 
of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the 
Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the 
Pilgrim's Progress, a book that breathes of every beau- 
tiful and valuable emotion. 

But of works of art little can be said; their influence 
is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they 
mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are 
bettered, yet know not how. It is in books more spe- 
cifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and 
distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has 
been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, 
and so may stand first, though I think its influence was 
only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, 
for it is a book not easily outlived: the Essais of Mon- 
taigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a 
great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day ; 
they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of hero- 
ism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have 
their "linen decencies" and excited orthodoxies fluttered, 
and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that 
these have not been fluttered without some excuse and 
ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of 
reading) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman 
was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen 
ways a nobler view of life, than they or their con- 
temporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was 
the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel ac- 
cording to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and 
move any one if they could make a certain effort of 
imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droning- 



^ 



INFLUENCED ME 2^7 

ly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would 
then be able to see in it those truths which we are all 
courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain 
from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps 
better to be silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of 
singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside 
down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of 
genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken 
my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong 
foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But 
it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift 
of reading. I will be very frank — I believe it is so with 
all good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average 
man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that 
gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to dis- 
compose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries 
out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the 
closer round that little idol of part-truths and part- 
conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is 
convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and be- 
comes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New 
truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth 
is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and 
often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had 
better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he 
will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I 
came under the influence, of Herbert Spencer. No more 
persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of 
his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how; much 
is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to in- 
quire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and 
honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly ab- 
stract Joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but 



298 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput 
mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but 
with most of its essentials ; and these two qualities make 
him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigor makes him 
a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I 
lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great importance for 
me when it first fell into my hands — a strange instance 
of the partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know 
no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a 
very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the 
doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in 
that crowning offence of Werther, and in his own char- 
acter a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the 
rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish in- 
quisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his 
office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his 
honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what 
lessons are contained ! Biography, usually so false to 
its office, does here for once perform for us some of the 
work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly 
mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and 
shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same char- 
acter. History serves us well to this effect, but in the 
originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomizer, 
who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us 
feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential 
identity of man, and even in the originals only to 
those who can recognize their own human virtues 
and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under 
strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet 
of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to 
read his works dispassionately, and find in this un- 
seemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, 
wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary. 



INFLUENCED ME 299 

I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant 
verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found 
them for myself; and this partiality is one among a 
thousand things that help to build up our distorted and 
hysterical conception of the great Roman Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble 
book — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dis- 
passionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the 
tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were 
practised on so great a scale- in the life of its writer, 
make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read 
it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals 
to the feelings — those very mobile, those not very trusty 
parts of man. Its address lies further back: its lesson 
comes more deeply home ; when you have read, you 
carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is 
as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into 
brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another 
bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to 
the love of virtue. 

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one 
]ias been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to 
tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged aus- 
terity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that is in 
the lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, 
cling to his work and give it a particular address to what 
is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; 
you need not — Mill did not — agree with any one of his 
beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best 
teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error — the old 
one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is 
a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb be- 
yond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and 
what is best in themselves, that they communicate. 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. 



300 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 



It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic 
art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have 
read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a 
Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send 
the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of 
human faults, is not great art ; we can all be angry with 
our neighbor; what we want is to be shown, not his de- 
fects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to 
which we are too blind. And The Egoist is a satire ; so 
much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular 
quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, 
which is engaged from first to last with that invisible 
beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are 
your own faults that are dragged into the day and num- 
bered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- 
cision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the 
story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of 
you,'* he cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear 
fellow," said the author; "he is all of us." I have read 
The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read 
it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote 
— I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very service- 
able exposure of myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have 
forgotten much that was most influential, as I see al- 
ready I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose 
paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning- 
point in my life, and Penn, Avhose little book of aphor- 
isms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's 
Tales of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time 
the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's 
laws — a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. 
That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope 
or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point, 
after having said so much upon improving books, to say 



1 



INFLUENCED ME 301 

a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift 
of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor 
very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a 
vast intellectual endowment — a free grace, I find I must 
call it — by which a man rises to understand that he is 
not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs 
absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas ; he may hold 
them passionately; and he may know that others hold 
them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them 
not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these 
others will be full of meat for him. They will see the 
other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. 
He need not change his dogma for that, but he may 
change his reading of that dogma, and he must sup- 
plement and correct his deductions from it. A human 
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much 
of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, 
or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can 
extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our 
drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, 
or that seems insolently false or very dangerous^ is the 
test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what 
truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If 
he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his 
author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; 
he will never be a reader. 

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I 
have laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its 
opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited 
content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in 
a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; 
and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make 
themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this 
early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, 
laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most 



302 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a 
mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good 
for service; but he is sure besides that when his words 
fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be 
weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will 
be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of 
one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite 
silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his 
secret is kept as if he had not written. 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

(1888) 

I 

These boys congregated every autumn about a certain 
easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a high de- 
gree the glory of existence. The place was created sjeem- 
ingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlenien. 
A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them 
tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse 
and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a 
shady alley; many little gardens more than usually 
bright with flowers ; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scold- 
ing in the backward parts ; a smell of fish, a genial smell 
of seaweed ; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners ; 
shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another 
shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and 
the London Journal, dear to me for its startling pic- 
tures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names : 
such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients 
of the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a 
spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 303 

villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their sub- 
sidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify 
the scene: a. haven in the. rocks in front: in front of that, 
a file of gray islets: to the left, endless links and sand- 
wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping 
rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of sea- 
ward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins 
of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; 
coves between — now charmed into sunshine quiet, now 
whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges ; 
the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and 
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean 
and pungent of the sea — in front of all, the Bass Rock, 
tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing 
it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit 
like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of 
seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the 
Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colors of King 
James ; and in the ear of fancy the arches o-f Tantallon 
still rang with horseshoe iron, and echoed to the com- 
mands of Bell-the-Cat. 

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a 
boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of 
pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem 
to have been better employed. You might secrete your- 
self in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of 
elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, 
and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roof- 
less walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit them- 
selves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the 
art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to 
harbor there; and you might have seen a single penny 
pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, 
bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again, you 
might join our fishing-parties, where we sat perched as 



304. THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

thick as solan-geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and 
girl, angling over each other's heads, to the much en- 
tanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent 
shrill recrimination — shrill as the geese themselves. In- 
deed, had that been all, you might have done this often; 
but though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce 
to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a 
point of honor that a boy should eat all that he had 
taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the 
whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, 
and behold the face of many counties, and the smokes 
and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. 
You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that 
we pathetically call our summer, now in a gale of wind, 
with the sand scourging your bare, hide, your clothes 
thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, 
the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong 
ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore 
the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when 
the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered ; 
following my leader from one group to another, groping 
in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in 
pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and 
ever with, an eye cast backward on the march of the tide 
and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you 
might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore 
eating in the open air; digging perhaps a house under 
the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, 
and cooking apples there — if they were truly apples, for 
I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us 
off with some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of 
resolving, in the neighborhood of fire, into mere sand 
and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, 
you might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the grassy 
court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 306 

or clambering along the coast, eat geans * (the worst, I 
must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous 
gean-tree that had taken root under a cliff, where it 
was shaken with an ague of east wind, and silvered after 
gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its bleak 
surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adven- 
ture in itself. 

There are mingled some dismal memories with so 
many that were joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, 
who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran 
with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and 
beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on 
the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the 
bandage all bloody — horror ! — the fisher-wife herself, 
who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and 
even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. 
She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street; 
but whether or no she died there, with a wise terror 
of the worst, I never inquired. She had been tippling; 
it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and 
hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner 
should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book 
of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a certain 
house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark 
old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead body ; 
nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself 
and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the 
dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened 
a window in that house of mortality and cursed us in a 
shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It 
was a pair of very colorless urchins that fled down the 
lane from this remarkable experience ! But I recall 
with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of 
fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; 

* Wild cherries. 



306 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the boats 
with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbor mouth, 
where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the 
wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blow- 
ing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was against 
them) they might see boat and husband and sons — their 
whole wealth and their whole family — engulfed under 
their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of neigh- 
bors forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she 
squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely 
human, a tragic Maenad. 

These are things that I recall with interest; but what 
my memory dwells upon the most, I have been all this 
while withholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, 
and indeed to a week or so of our two months* holiday 
there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for 
boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces 
inscrutable to man; so- that tops and marbles reappear 
in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and 
the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of 
the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. 
It may still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, 
I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it on 
Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm be- 
ing quite local, like a country wine that cannot be ex- 
ported. 

The idle manner of it was this: — 

Toward the end of September, when school-time was 
drawing near and the' nights were already black, we 
would begin to sally from our respective villas, each 
equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was 
so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce 
of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, 
began to garnish their windows with our particular 
brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 307 

upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor 
of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noi- 
somely of blistered tin ; they never burned aright, though 
they would always burn our fingers; their use was 
naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet 
a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for 
nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their 
boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had 
got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we 
ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them 
at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; 
yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, in- 
deed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and 
we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were 
more common, and to certain story-books in which we 
had found them to figure very largely. But take it for 
all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; 
and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was 
good enough for us. 

When two of these asses met, there would be an anx- 
ious "Have you got your lantern.^" and a gratified 
"Yes !" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too ; 
for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none 
could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless (like the pole- 
cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb 
into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the 
thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked, 
or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind 
might whistle overhead. There the coats would be un- 
buttoned and the bull's-eye discovered, and in the 
checkering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the 
night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, 
these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together 
in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of 
the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappro- 



308 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

priate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some speci- 
mens — some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries 
into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so 
fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so ro- 
mantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but 
a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only ac- 
cidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence 
of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; 
the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escap- 
ing, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your 
glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and 
all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's 
heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and 
to exult and sing over the knowledge. 

II 

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of 
the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this 
(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, 
and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not 
done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness 
of man's imagination. His life from without may seem 
but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden 
chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; 
and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, 
he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt. 

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless 
than that of Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old 
Bailey Reports," a prey to the most sordid persecutions, 
the butt of his neighborhood, betrayed by his hired man, 
his house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and he 
himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to 
the law against these pin-pricks. You marvel at first 
that any one should willingly prolong a life so desti- 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 311 

. r ; they have walked alone in the woods, they have 
1^ ilked in cities under the countless lamps; they have 

een to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they 
lave longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the 
m\d taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if you 
ieny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have 
tasted to the full — their books are there to prove it — 
the keen pleasure of successful literary composition. 
And yet they fill the globe with volumes, whose clever- 
ness inspires me with despairing admiration, and whose 
consistent falsity to all I ca^e to call existence, with 
despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to con- 
tinue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, 
and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with 
which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare 
I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine^ 
gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a 
railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, 
I could count some grains of memory, compared to which 
the whole of one of these romances seems but dross. 

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) 
that this was very true ; that it was the same with them- 
selves and other persons of (what they call) the artistic 
temperament; that in this we were exceptional, and 
should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that 
our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) 
the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and 
quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I ac- 
cept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. 
The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) 
does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it 
would make us incapable of writing novels; and the 
average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you 
and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman 
who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon 



312 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and 
showed very nobly, that the average man was full of 
joys and full of a poetry of his own. And this harping 
on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profes- 
sion of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry 
of the blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the 
dumb tongue, / cannot utter. To draw a life without 
delights is to prove I have not realized it. To picture 
a man without some sort of poetry — well, it goes near 
to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little 
enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small- 
minded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, be- 
sieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small 
attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as 
. . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen 
(with a more becoming modesty) were content to pluck 
Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not suppose they 
had surprised his secret or could put him living in a 
book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or 
say that in the same romance — I continue to call these 
books romances, in the hope of giving pain — say that 
in the same romance, which now begins really to take 
shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow 
instead the Harrow boys ; and say that I came on some 
such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the 
links; and described the boys as very cold, spat upon 
by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of 
which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, 
which it certainly was. I might upon these lines, and 
had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of 
literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of 
a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging 
hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph 
would my picture be of shallowness and dulness ! how 
it would have missed the point ! how it would have be- 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 313 

lied the boys ! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk 
is merely silly and indecent ; but ask the boys themselves, 
and they are discussing (as it is highly proper they 
should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of 
the observer they are wet and cold and drearily sur- 
rounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven 
of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill- 
smelling lantern. 

Ill 

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often 
hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere ac- 
cessory, like the lantern, it may reside, like Dancer's, 
in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It miay con- 
sist with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the con- 
tinued chase. It has so little bond with externals (such 
as the observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may 
even touch them not; and the man's true life, for which 
he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. 
The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning 
battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping 
triumph in the arts: all leading another life, plying 
another trade from that they chose; like the poet's 
housebuilder, who, after all is cased in stone, 

"By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts, 
Rebuilds it to his hking." 

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The ob- 
server (poor soul, with his documents !) is all abroad. 
For to look at the man is but to court deception. We 
shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourish- 
ment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green 
dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested 



314 THE LANTERN-BEARERS 

in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of 
the poets_, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and 
catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. 
And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that 
of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it 
a voice far beyond singing. 

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the 
actors lies the sense of any action. That is the ex- 
planation, that the excuse. To one who has not the 
secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is mean- 
ingless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral un- 
reality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the 
English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we 
observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide 
of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweet- 
heart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands 
by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, in- 
stead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence 
in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sen- 
suality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the 
hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, 
into every description of misconduct and dishonor. In 
each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted at- 
mosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes 
what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in 
each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away 
like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, 
each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external 
truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas- 
magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted win- 
dows and the storied walls. 

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from 
a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's Powers of Dark- 
ness, Here is a piece full of force and truth, yet quite 
untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a situ- 



THE LANTERN-BEARERS 315 

ation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at 
least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness 
of crime and gives no hint of any loveliness in the 
temptation, sins against the modesty of life, and even 
when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The 
peasants are not understood; they saw their life in 
fairer colors; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry 
for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again, 
even an Old Bailey melodrama, witliout some bright- 
ness of poetr}'^ and lustre of existence, falls into the 
inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales. 



IV 

In nobler books we are moved with something like 
the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously 
provoked. We are so moved when Levine labors in 
the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Rich- 
ard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the 
river, when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet," 
when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, 
in Dostoieffsky's Despised and Rejected, the uncom- 
plaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. 
These are notes that please the great heart of man. 
Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of 
danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffer- 
ing humbly supported, touch in us the vein of the po- 
etic. We love to think of them, we long to try them, 
we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also. 

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. 
Here is the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquam 
silvam. 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 

(1888) 

We lcK)k for some reward of our endeavors and are 
disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace 
of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. 
Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the 
battle goes sore against us to the going down of the 
sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; 
and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, 
and find them change with every climate, and no coun- 
try where some action is not honored for a virtue and 
none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in 
our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest 
rules, but at the best a municijDal fitness. It is not 
strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask 
too much. Our religions and moralities have been 
trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and 
sentimentalized, and only please and weaken. Truth 
is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith 
can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing 
more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones 
and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are 
but moss and fungus, more ancient still. 



Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports 
many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There 
seems no substance to this solid globe on which we 
stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and 
ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; 

316 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 317 

gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and 
worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely 
as the squares of distances ; and the suns and worlds 
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 
and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; 
that way madness lies ; science carries us into zones of 
speculation, where there is no habitable city for the 
mind of man. 

But take the Kosmos witli a grosser faith, as our 
senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory 
islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of 
systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, 
like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desola- 
tion. All of these we take to be made of something we 
call matter: a thing which i\q analysis can help us to 
conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity 
can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified 
by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something 
we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pedicu- 
lous malady; swelling in tumors that become indepen- 
dent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) loco- 
motory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering 
into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. 
This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, 
yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion 
of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a 
marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our 
breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But 
none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; 
the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is 
a mere issue of worms ; even in the hard rock the crystal 
is forming. 

In two main shapes this eruption covers the coun- 
tenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one 
in some degree the inversion of the other: the second 



318 PULVIS ET UMBRA 

rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its 
natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet 
of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of 
birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con- 
sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with the an- 
chored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they have 
their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing ago- 
nies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to 
which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These 
share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of 
sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that 
bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by 
which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its 
image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the 
miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and 
staggering consequences. And to put the last touch 
upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the in- 
conceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tear- 
ing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside them- 
selves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the 
vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than 
the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the 
eater of the dumb. 

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with preda- 
tory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal 
and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through 
space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate 
cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety 
million miles away. 

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of 
the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying 
drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 319 

ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with 
hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter 
in his face; a thing to set children screaming; — and yet 
looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how 
surprising are his attributes ! Poor soul, here for so 
little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires 
so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely sur- 
rounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned 
to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed 
him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being 
merely barbarous? And we look and behold him in- 
stead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, 
often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting 
down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and 
wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do 
battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his 
friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing 
forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his 
young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in 
him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the 
thought of duty; the thought of something owing to 
himself, to his neighbor, to his God: an ideal of decency, 
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of 
shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. 
The design in most men is one of conformity; here and 
there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars 
on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; 
but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought: — Not 
in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we 
know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of 
honor sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of 
whom we know so little : — But in man, at least, it sways 
with so complete an empire that merely selfish things 
come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are 
starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that al- 



320 PULVIS ET UMBRA 

most the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, 
although it were a child's; and all but the most cow- 
ardly stand amid the risks of war ; and the more noble, 
having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, 
affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with 
their singular origin and perverted practice, they think 
they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger 
still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think 
this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless 
for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of 
misconception and misconduct man at large presents: 
of organized injustice, cowardly violence, and treach- 
erous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the 
best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is in- 
deed marked for failure in his efforts to do right.' But 
where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more 
remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely 
we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in 
a field from which success is banished, our race should 
not cease to labor. 

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his ro- 
tatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stout- 
est, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring 
wonder. It matters not where we look, under what 
climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in 
what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous 
morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powder- 
ing his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he 
sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his 
grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a 
man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his bright- 
est hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who 
sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, inno- 
cent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brare 
to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, movin|g 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 321 

among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, 
without hope of change in the future, with scarce a 
pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, 
honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted 
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long- 
suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ; in India 
(a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and 
streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred 
river ; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly 
on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the 
comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of 
honor and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's 
scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, 
and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: — everywhere 
some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some de- 
cency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign 
of man's ineffectual goodness : — ah ! if I could show 
you this ! if I could show you these men and women, 
all the world over, in every stage of history, under every 
abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, 
without hope, without help, without thanks, still ob- 
scurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, 
in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor, 
the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to es- 
cape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege 
and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some 
nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at 
their heels, the implacable hunter. 

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange 
and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair- 
crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years 
and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, 
and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, 
however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A 
new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago 



322 PULVIS ET UMBRA 

by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into 
the body of our thoughts_, lights us a step farther into 
the heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowa- 
days the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with 
the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing 
apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of an- 
other genus : and in him, too, we see dumbly testified 
the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same con- 
stancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We look 
at our feet where the ground is blackened with the 
swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in 
the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and 
scarce cofmprehend his doings; and here also, in his 
ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed 
the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it 
stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well- 
doing and this doom of frailty run through all the 
grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top 
of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one 
stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious 
tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth 
and travaileth together. It is the common and the god- 
like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, 
the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the 
oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they 
share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of 
an ideal: strive like us — like us are tempted to grow 
weary of the struggle — to do well; like us receive at 
times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, re- 
turns of courage; and are condemned like us to be cru- 
cified between that double law of the members and the 
will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of 
some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, 
stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings 
of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 323 

the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call 
wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they 
should look for. Even while they look, even while they 
repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in 
the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the 
bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the 
vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of 
a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared 
with whom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wis- 
dom, our brief span eternity. 

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of ter- 
ror and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid 
it should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in 
his own eyes — God forbid it should be man that wearies 
in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or 
utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for 
faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, 
strives with unconquerable constancy: surely not all 
in vain. 



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